Why does one person survive while another is lost? Can past transgressions be atoned for? What if someone were torn from a plane at 34,000 feet—and lived to tell the tale?
I write to explore the questions that unsettle us.
In my latest novel, The Falling, a woman plummets 34,000 feet—and survives, though survival is never as simple as it seems. In The Bears of Winter, a woman returns to her ramshackle hometown in remote Alaska to uncover secrets about her past, discovering the fallibility of memory and her complicity in a young boy’s death. The story was finalized in an off-the-grid yurt one cold Alaskan winter. My earliest novel, The Long Thirst, now rewritten with a female protagonist, was born from months spent drifting across Northern India on a shoestring budget during a hallucination-producing heat wave. It’s a modern-day female Siddhartha story about a woman transporting her husband’s cryogenically frozen body across those arid plains.
My stories are about seekers, often women who must find their strength—stories where the landscape is a force of its own (Alaska, India, Peru, the Pacific Northwest). At the heart of my work is the belief that even in our darkest moments, meaning can be forged, lost power can be reclaimed, and even when we are most unmoored, there is still something to tether us—if only we reach for it.
My work received the Zola Award, Jean M. Auel Mainstream Novel (PNWA 2004); 1st runner-up for the William Faulkner/William Wisdom Award, novel-in-progress (2011); 2nd place, Kay Snow Award (2007); and was a finalist for both the UNO and Faulkner Awards (2020). In the pre-digital age, my shorter works appeared in Seattle, Aboard, Northwest Travel, The Rozella Review, Transitions Abroad, Mature Living, The Double Dealer, and more.
I’m an explorer, a lover of the outdoors, and a flight attendant by profession—passions that keep me in motion, always collecting stories. When not traveling or writing, I live near Seattle, Washington, with my partner, enjoying cooking, gardening, and the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
All three novel manuscripts are available.