To live your life in your own way is the ultimate success – and an ongoing struggle. I explore that struggle in my work and have tried to embody it in my life. The Wanderer, the first in a series of novels about a pagan medieval world, introduces Lucinda who must learn to embrace who she is in order to stop a threat to her world.
I’ve been fascinated by the poetry of the early medieval period ever since taking a class in Old English in graduate school. Ultimately my career lay outside academia but that love of ancient stories never left.
Old English poets are melancholy for a world that no longer is and probably never was and frequently explore the sadness of exile. It is in this tension between independence and isolation that Lucinda lives, trying to navigate a path to her true self.
In my own life, a move from small-town Kansas to Los Angeles was a reclaiming of who I am.
I’ve spent years as a story editor, as a teacher of story editing, and this has taught me a great deal about crafting stories that go beyond familiar formulas and tropes. Learning the craft of writing is a process that I hope to engage with for my whole life.