BIO

I came home from a summer as an exchange student in Denmark knowing two things: I loved history, and I loved traveling and meeting new people.  My parents collected early-American antiques. By their measure, anything over 75 years of age qualified.  The house of my host family in Denmark was 400-years-old, and the church where my host-father preached was 800-years-old. I saw where battles had been fought and where Danes had lived ten centuries before I was born. It was a revelation. My writing career began with that trip, keeping the editor of my hometown paper apprised of all I saw.  A former NYT editor, he convinced me I should continue writing.  Although a west-coaster by birth, marriage, and preference, I’ve lived in many places, including nearly four years in Japan.

My published works include numerous articles in newspapers and magazines, primarily on finance and budget, and short stories appearing in the Clackamas Literary Journal, Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Path, and Mooring Against the Tide; Writing Fiction and Poetry by Tim Schell and Jeff Knorr, published by Prentice Hall.  My published novels include Two-Hearted Crossing, Patrimony, Echoes from a Falling Bridge, Harvest the Wind, Lotus Blossom Unfurling, and Queenie’s Place.

INSPIRATION

Music inspires me. I’ve listened to arias—like the one from Madame Butterfly—and had tears run down my cheeks—how could anything be so hauntingly beautiful? I listen to my granddaughter belt out a bluesy song like Skyfall or I Will Always Love You, or hear her sing the National Anthem, acapella, before a basketball or football game and I’m stunned by that huge voice coming from that petite little body. Where did she get such talent?

People inspire me. I look at the cathedrals in Europe that soar over the heads of worshipers and realize they were designed by men without computers or even slide-rulers and built by men without cranes or levels. And yet, if one minor thing had been off by maybe so little as an inch, the whole thing would have collapsed. And yet some have stood for a thousand years or more. How did those long-ago men (and maybe some women) do it? Or now, when it rains in Venice at high tide and the ancient city seems to be sinking into the Adriatic, up go the portable walkways and umbrellas and Venetians simply go about their business. How can they do that?

Nature inspires me. A poet, May Sartin, once wrote of the richness of solitude versus the poverty of loneliness. I’ve felt both of those emotions at times, but as I gaze out from the deck of our home on the banks of what was once the Snake River—a millennium ago or perhaps only a hundred years ago, before all the dams were built and changed the course of the river—and see the newly restored Roswell Marsh surrounded by lush, alternating fields of corn, wheat, onions, potatoes and alfalfa, the Owyhee Mountains and the Blues on the horizon—and on a clear day the tips of the Strawberries—I luxuriate in the richness of solitude.  And when that richness palls a bit, I rejoice in my nearby family and I wonder, how did I get so lucky?