From the time I could read and write, I, well, read and wrote. 

 

When I was really young, I wrote rhyming poems, clearly reflecting my activist bent as

the daughter of  young MASH unit surgeon who had been sent away for a year to

Vietnam, a bent I’d re-find later in life, and which produced the talented

likes of:  

 

 

 

Stop All Wars!

 

People fighting, 

bighting [sic] too,

This is enough I think don’t you?

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Heh. Not so bad for an 8 year old.

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As I got older, I switched to free verse, writing lots of angsty love poems with rainbow water colors decorating them (a voice I would abandon soon after college, and finally revisit as an author in THE MEMORY OF THINGS, writing the bird girl’s part in fragmented, poetic thoughts).  

 

                                      In college and post college, I continued to write creatively, taking creative writing                                          workshops at Gotham Writers Workshop in NYC and expanding from poetry to                                            short stories, but in all of it, I never once thought about becoming a writer. Let’s just                                        say it was beyond my wildest dreams.

 

                                      In 1988, I applied to law school, and after I graduated, I practiced family law                                              (and still continue to!), got married and had my first son. Only when I was                                                    pregnant with my second son, did I realize how much I missed the creative side of                                          myself and began work on a novel -- one that I never actually thought I could write,                                        and took me five years to complete.

 

That manuscript got me a fancy NYC agent, but never sold to a publisher, nor did the one I wrote after it. But the third one -- a poignant little story I wrote for my sons, originally called Steinbeck, The Scoot, and the Pull of Gravity, about what it means to be a family (in all its difficult messiness), first love, and the true meaning of friendship -- sold to the legendary Frances Foster at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, as the Bank Street Award winning THE PULL OF GRAVITY (2011).

The rest, as they say, is a very checkered history. Which is why, in addition to visiting schools to talk about my books, I also share presentations on rejection and perseverance, and what it means to succeed in the arts.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now? 

 

In addition to writing, I read, I swim, I listen to my sons play incredible music (check them out on Spotify and YouTube!), and spend quality time with my family. 

 

 

I march and rail against the injustices in the world. 

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I change my hair color often.

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I plant flowers in the spring and summer and toss an extra-small Kong tennis ball to our cute little dog all day long, and feed our citrus leatherback bearded dragon blueberries and raspberries, always making wishes for a kinder, gentler, happier, environmentally-sound world. 

 

You?