When my son was in late elementary/early middle school, he and two of his best friends favored a gamed I call “How About,” because that was always the way the game began. “How about I’m king of the river and you’re trying to get across and I try...
What is Cli-fi?
When I began working on my novel Weather Woman back in 2013, I had no idea I was writing Climate Fiction, now commonly referred to as Cli-fi. I’d never heard of Cli-fi before—most people hadn’t—I was simply exploring a What-if premise that...
Why I Turned Away From Realism and Began to Write Surreal Fiction
My turn away from realistic fiction.
Revisiting the Books of Childhood
In a recent flurry of bookshelf reorganizing, I came across the collection of books saved from my childhood. Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, A Wrinkle in Time, Half Magic, Stuart Little. Charlotte’s Web, The Secret Garden...
Playing with Punctuation
When my partner reads my fiction—he’s always my first reader—he invariably rolls his eyes. He doesn’t understand why I’m so stingy with commas. This has happened to us enough times that we merely laugh about it. I’ve been a punctuation rebel for...
Creating Art in Dark Times
Dear Friends, Readers, Sympathizers, Things are beginning to change. The election is finally over (mostly), and the doomsday outlook of the last few years is loosening its grip. Here in my neck of the woods the awareness of...
Beginning Again
I am just now, on the heels of the election, beginning to write a new novel. As often happens, several obsessions I’ve been nursing for a while, have suddenly come together as a narrative, as if they were charged magnets, needing to connect. It’s...
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
A number of years ago, my husband and I worked together writing screenplays. It was a regular and essential part of our lives to submit work—pitches, treatments, or completed screenplays—to studios and production companies. Along with those...
Writing Places I’ve Never Been
I have never been to Siberia, and yet Tiksi Russia, a Siberian town above the Arctic Circle on the edge of the Laptev Sea, figures prominently in my forthcoming novel, Weather Woman. When I became interested in Tiksi as a possible setting for the...
Electronic Reading
A few months ago a friend decided she didn’t like reading on her Kobo and she gave it to me. The timing was perfect. I had just returned from a 5-week trip on which I’d run out of reading material. Though I have been staunchly resistant to...