WRITINGS
“Sister, Sister” Snapdragon: A journal of Art and Healing June 2019 https://www.snapdragonjournal.com/
Ellipsis, 2003; Potomac Review, 2004
AWARDS
Artist Trust Fellowship in Literature, Washington State 2004
Hedgebrook Residency 2002, 2008, 2015
Books
The Orchard Keepers
Shadow Sister ( In Progress)
The Orchard Keepers Contact me if interested.
Immigration, legal and otherwise, women finding their place through work and family, sexual abuse, the question ‘where is home’ infuses this novel with contemporary themes without losing the power of this story. The Orchard Keepers, set in the working fruit orchards of eastern Washington state and Chihuahua, Mexico and the landscape in-between focusing on borders—personal ones, between men and women, between men of power and those they need to do the work, between undocumented and American born, and the distance between home in Mexico and home in America.
In The Orchard Keepers, Dolores Sanchez has returned to the orchards of her childhood in eastern Washington carrying a secret. Her boss, el jefe Jacobsen, fathered the teenage boy she calls her cousin. Now Mr. Goode is dead and his daughter, Kate, together with her husband, runs the fruit ranch. Kate has been newly diagnosed with early-stage multiple sclerosis. She struggles to do the harvest work that anchors her marriage and self-worth, a love of farm work she inherited from her father. But her stubbornness to accept her illness is driving her away from the people she loves—particularly her sister Olivia, who has reluctantly returned home to help Kate. In the wake of a near-fatal fire at the height of the Bing cherry harvest, the secrets of these three women's pasts—the daughter beloved of the father who inherits the family ranch but flees to Mexico, the rejected daughter who returns with secrets all her own, and the young Mexican woman who shoulders the burdens of the father's sins—explode into the present.
Shadow Sister (novel in progress)
A bombing in Jerusalem August 9th, 2001 unexpectedly reconnects two young American twin sisters and their family to familial Jews in Berdichev, who disappeared when Germany invaded the Ukraine in 1941. In August 2001, Mara and her estranged twin, Rebecca, discover their mother, Anne, on her first trip to Israel, has been badly injured in a terrorist attack in the heart of Jerusalem and their paternal grandmother, Lila, is missing. When their beloved Lila, turns up, injured, confused and calling for Vera, her baby sister, Mara is astounded. Mara never knew her grandmother Lila even had a sister. Reluctantly, their father tells them that two-year-old Vera was left behind in 1922 with his mother’s sister, Anna, when the rest of his family emigrated to America. Great Aunt Vera would have been 21 years old when the Nazis invaded Berdichev in June 1941. Exactly Mara and Rebecca’s age.
Mara and Rebecca’s personal evolution as young women, what they value and thought they believed as reluctant Jews, is challenged by the violence wreaked on their mother and grandmother and the hope and fear they encounter between Israelis and Palestinians during the Second Intifada. Mara becomes obsessed with unearthing what really happened to their Great Aunt Vera and determining the fate of those Jews left behind in Berdichev. Rebecca maneuvers to return to college and her pre-med studies even though the bombing in Jerusalem and revelations of her great aunt unravels her carefully constructed map of her life. Vera's grows up in Berdichev, Ukraine with her mother’s sister, Aunt Anna. Her survival before the war and during the German invasion is the historical thread and backdrop to Mara and Rebecca’s contemporary story of rupture and healing. With the bombing of Berdichev June 1941 and Vera’s Aunt Anna and Uncle Zeb refusing to leave, Vera flees East with friends and thousands of others as the Red Army retreats just behind them in a journey across central Asia searching for sanctuary.
The historical narrative of Vera's survival during the German invasion converges with the contemporary story when Mara discovers an artifact her Great Aunt Vera has donated to the holocaust museum in Israel, an herbal medicine journal. Through research and serendipity, Mara discovers that her Great Aunt Vera—her injured, confused elderly Grandmother Delila’s baby sister Vera—may be living in Israel, upending these two young American women and their family.
By novel’s end, Mara and Rebecca begin to rebuild their relationship with each other, their connections with expanded family, and wrestle with what it means to be a Jew. They reunite in the states with guarded hope and a larger vision of their place in the world.