Born in Paris, raised in Washington, D.C. by a divorced and working mother, before either was trending, I was, from the start, from away. An outsider. More weed than wallflower. And there were lots to watch. I grew up surrounded by journalists and writers, foreign service types, and artists, who knew their bounds. And influenced by women who didn’t. 

I spent a lot of time reading books and telling myself stories. I was an only child until my mother remarried when I was on the brink of thirteen, and my father, who had opened whole worlds of imagination, left for Central America.  

By the time I was set to go to college, my mother had three children five and younger and, a continent away and married a third time, my father had two stepdaughters and a son born my last day of high school. My grandparents, my one safety net as a child, were contending with my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease. 

Which is perhaps why neither of them saw the huge, ginormous, red flag waving when I was accepted into the first class of women of a small liberal arts college, hitherto all male, in the Midwest. I arrived on campus unprepared for the attitude toward women, and I reacted. 

It wasn’t long before I made myself known.  And I paid the consequences. Great fodder for the gin-soaked poetry that followed after I dropped out on April Fool’s Day of my junior year. Neither of my parents saw the humor there. 

This time I was definitely on my own. I had no money, no degree, no plans. I was one hundred percent a pantser. It was gruesome and glorious. And then I took a two-year intensive theater training program that focused on character development and self-scripting. 

That experience changed, possibly saved, my life. I performed in a couple of plays, taught a few workshops, and learned much of what I know about writing. I also learned that as much as I loved the process, I was not, and never would be, a theater person. 

After three years in Santa Fe, and a brief sojourn in New Hampshire caring for my dying grandfather, I moved to Western Massachusetts, where I married, had children, and found work as a correspondent at a daily newspaper. It was there I learned the discipline of writing. 

Two decades later, when my mother was diagnosed with cancer, I retired from reporting on stories that seemed trivial in light of my mother dying. I joined a writers group at the local library and began to write fiction. I felt like I was where I’d been born to be.