I was asked what I write. The answer is complicated.

There has been plenty to write about and I have been getting some of it down, typing away at my computer.

In 1990, when I assigned a paper in Junior English that had to be typed, a mother called me at school to ask if it could be word-processed because her son didn’t have access to a typewriter. Times change.

I cannot recall writing fiction as a child. I played horses and drew pictures of horses and made lists of horse names and imaginary horse pedigrees. I didn’t tell stories. Probably it’s my mother I have most to thank for being a decent essayist. She typed my papers, and often she would stop at a point in my essay and ask me questions. It was a very tactful way of teaching me to write clearly and concisely. [Lessons I am still learning.]

In Cordell Junior High School (grades 7-9) I wrote a short story from the point of view of Marie Antoinette. In high school I kept a journal and some of my [terrible] poetry might be considered fiction. I wrote no short stories again until I completed a Haystack weeklong workshop with Sandra Dorr.

In between, I wrote essays. Five paragraph essays in 9th grade, position papers and 20- and 30-page research papers while still in Shoreline High School. Essays were always in third person, but my first term at the University of Washington, just after my 18th birthday, I wrote an essay about Mark Twain in first person. The instructor noted that had I handed it in the previous spring, the point of view would have been deemed unacceptable. English Department had changed its rules just in time for me.

Though I took the minimum of English classes while earning degrees in ceramic art and metal design, I was still writing essays for Art History, Botany, and Anthropology while completing my studio degrees, and right at the end for my Education classes, which were easier.

I taught Art at an elite girls school east of Seattle for three years, and in 1979 we moved to Oregon. We had six or seven Afghan Hounds by then, and I was trying to get pregnant. I worked as a substitute teacher, wrote mostly funny essays for the sighthound magazines, and bore two boys. Once they were in school or daycare I went back to work as a substitute teacher. And then after scoring English papers for the Department Head and covering for an English teacher on leave, I was hired to teach English in 1990.

That’s when I shifted from mostly humorous creative nonfiction about sighthounds to fiction about people.

That summer I wrote “Baptism” about a boy who fears his dog has drowned in an irrigation ditch. That story eventually became a linked series of short stories, LIVING IN SNAKELAND, developed as my thesis collection while earning my MFA in 2007. I will be sending it out as a middle grade novel out next year.

Over the summer of 1995 (I think), a talented student and I each began writing a novella. By August we admitted to having written novels. Hers was much better than mine, and this was before her senior year of high school. [Seriously better, an editor at Harper-Collins even said he’d read anything she cared to send in the future.] Today she’s a tenured English professor.

CLEAN AWAY is a novel in many voices of the women of a single family. They make similar mistakes, over and over, but collectively move forward not only in time but in awareness. I wrote the first scene the summer of 1996 at The Flight of the Mind and finished it some years later. I queried it sixty times or so and had some interest twenty-some years ago, but it was beyond my abilities at the time. I’d like to come back to it. [I am passionate about this story, but… Should I add “Watching the Bats Come Out” and “Up in Smoke” and continue working on what was originally titled Bitch Trial? I was advised by a paid editor to cut all but one POV, from the eight I had—the grandmother, aunts, mother, sisters, granddaughters. I did do that once upon a time, but now I accept that it was bad advice. I have found the old complete draft—probably awful, but maybe worth revisiting.]

A SINGLE FACT CAN SPOIL A GOOD ARGUMENT is a YA novel that I began many years ago, also in the 1990s, and have revised and updated this month. The first chapter was published while I was in the MFA program at Pacific University. Badly out-of-date, the characters now have cell phones. There’s still work to do. Give me another draft. Two more drafts… at least!

In the meantime, my novel ALL THE DAUGHTERS SING offers an alternative to dystopia, though I had to kill off humanity to allow it to happen.

After many years of working alone, I am now a member of a Zoom writing group! Input from our first meeting was enormously helpful to a story, “The Winter Gardener” which will be published early next year in Catamaran.

And Thanksgiving tomorrow, so I spend far too much imagination devising recipes.