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 My folks are
North Carolinians, but lived in West Virginia for three years, just long
enough to have my sister and me, while my preacher dad
served coal field churches. When I was two we moved to Loray, North
Carolina, just outside of Statesville. My little sister and I did a lot of
things the children do in my novels The Remember Box and
Carley's Song. Five years later we moved to Wilmington, where we
played in the Atlantic and promised we’d swim to France--tomorrow. When I
was twelve, we moved down the coast to Jacksonville, Florida. I decided in
ninth grade to become a writer, so after Robert E. Lee High, I headed to
Vassar College, which had a great creative writing program. After college I returned
to my folks, by then in Miami, to work toward a serious test of my writing
commitment. With $750, one suitcase, two coats and a portable typewriter,
I headed the next October to a Scottish Highland village where, at that
time, room and board cost $14 a week. Before the money ran out, I had sold
one poem, one article, one short story, and a one-act play. Fortified by
that major impact on British literature, I moved to Atlanta and started a
series of writing-related jobs. But no matter what I was writing, what I
was reading was mostly mysteries. When I met and married Bob in 1970, he looked over our budget and demanded, "Why don’t you write a
mystery to pay for all the ones you buy?" I immediately took a building
where I’d once worked and put a body in its basement. However, being over
endowed with the Protestant ethic, I wrote "important" things first and
only wrote the mystery in my spare time, so my first mystery, Murder at
Markham (reissued by Silver Dagger in 2001), took thirteen years to
complete. It took even longer for me to learn that any writing which gives
me pleasure is important, whether fiction or non-fiction.Since 1988 I have written nineteen mysteries, two other novels, and five non-fiction books, and am so grateful to my readers and editors for letting me do what I enjoy most in the world. Bob has concluded that writing is not a profession, it's an obsession--my favorite vacation is to go to a place where somebody else fixes my meals and where I can write more than I do at home, without interruptions. Thanks, if you are one of the readers who keeps my fingers on the keys. I do enjoy spending time with you at conferences, book clubs, and signing events. Bob is still my encourager and faithful patron of the arts. During our thirty-seven years together we have lived in Atlanta (four times), Chicago (twice), St. Petersburg (twice), Mobile, and Miami. Along the way we had two sons. Barnabas is married to Emi and they have two little boys. Ask me about my grandsons! Our younger son, David, lives and optimizes web sites in New York City, plays drums and a mean electric piano, and composes beautiful music. The rest of what you want to know, you’ll find in my books. The people are different, but the basic stories are true. I always figure, why make up anything I can remember instead? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
