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 experienced it in my life.
The Wanderer, the first in a series of novels about a pagan medieval world, introduces my protagonist, Lucinda (called Land-Stepper) who must learn to embrace who she is in order to stop a threat to her world.
People around us often want us to live our lives according to their ideas of what a good life is. But we usually have our own ideas! It is in this tension between independence and isolation that Lucinda lives, trying to navigate a path to her true self.
I’ve been fascinated by the poetry of the early medieval period ever since taking a class in Old English in graduate school. I ended up making the study of medieval literature the focus of my Ph.D.
Ultimately my career lay outside academia but that love of ancient stories never left. And while I created a complete fantasy world, the setting is greatly influenced by what I know about the early medieval time period.