As a young girl, I grew up on a small farm in Minnesota, with an interminably long driveway and my nearest friends several miles down the road. It was lonely, but I had the great luck to have parents who loved books.  Neither of them had the opportunity to go to college, but they read voraciously and taught me that pages held fascinating people, places and experiences far away from the seventeen acres where we lived. 

A well-used library card, and the books it provided, transformed my world.  With a book, I could be Laura Ingalls Wilder, living on the prairie; I became Nancy Drew, sleuthing my way around our farm; and I imitated Harriet the Spy, keeping observations in a notebook to make sense of my world.   

Even when I outgrew Harriet, I kept writing.  The crisp, cool feeling of a fresh piece of paper and the weight of a pen in my hand allowed my teenage emotions to flow from my mind onto the page, releasing my angst.  Writing offered me the freedom of expression when there was no other safe place. It also gave me somewhere to celebrate and remember - running a marathon, holding my husband’s hand, how the nose of the first dog we had, a chocolate lab, felt plush, like velvet, and how laying eyes on my children for the first time took my breath away. 

Those notebooks morphed into journals spanning over forty years of my life. My journals were the impetus, when I turned 50 (and needed a break from my kids!), to begin writing professionally.  I enrolled in writing classes, attended writer’s conferences, and wrote a 450 page draft of a memoir (still in process!)  

Now, I read the work of my modern-day heroines: Annie Lamott, Cheryl Strayed, Mary Karr, and Anne Pachett, among many others.  I write with a cup of tea or a Diet Coke, a cat on my lap, and a dog at my feet, surrounded by the periwinkle walls and inspirational sayings in my office.

y ultimate goal is to create stories like the ones that touched me - stories that immerse the reader to the point of forgetting that they are only a girl on a farm, or an ordinary person living an everyday life, as long as they keep their nose in a book.