About

My debut novel, This Body, was published by Little Brown and translated into German as Wie Das Leben So Spielt which means idiomatically, “That’s how the cookie crumbles.” This Body was also optioned to Hollywood where it disappeared into development hell. Bummer.

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SomeBody came together after I volunteered at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary and wanted to set a story there. Quince Bennet (the little sister from This Body) walked in with me and stayed to work.

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I like to explore dichotomies. The halves. The cleavage. The dimidiation (a new word I learned). The good/bad, black/white, right/wrong, young/old. The Jekyll/Hyde in all of us. When the bear is actually a bush. But also who and what stitches us back together and who lives within us after they've passed on.

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In 2020 (Covidtime), a Medium suggested I write "shorter pieces." Who am I to dispute a Medium, so a couple of my short stories and creative nonfiction essays have been published in various online magazines and literary journals since then.

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I live in the Sierra Foothills with my husband, Tom, and our senior rescue dogs. I've been a dog lover from way back as evinced in this photo taken by my mother when I was two years old. My middle name is Marian, and I felt destined to be a librarian. I worked in public, special, research, and academic libraries until I retired.

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After This Body was published, I got the same tattoo my character, Katharine, gets—a Janus symbol of one face looking into the future, the other face looking into the past and both of them guarding the portal into my heart.

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I've gotten a tattoo for every manuscript I've written. ​​

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