About Me

I grew up in a small town in eastern Washington spending some of my childhood in the fruit orchards of the Yakima’s lower valley on my grandparents’ land where The Goode Sisters is set. After spending years as an ICU nurse in Seattle and a short stint doing medical missionary work in Kerala India, I turned to writing. In 1998, I received an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College for Writers. In 2004, I received the Washington State Artist Trust literature fellowship for an excerpt of this first novel now called The Goode Sisters. My first novel, The Goode Sisters, will be published April 6th, 2027, by She Writes Press.I am grateful for my residency at Hedgebrook in 2002 and blessed to return as an alum in April 2008 and 2015. I am at work on my second novel, Shadow Sister and live in Seattle, Washington with my family.

Inspiration for The Goode Sisters

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 and subtly influenced by my childhood. Inspiration for The Goode Sisters, came, in part, from the many summers I spent on my grandparents fruit orchards in the Yakima’s lower valley where I wandered around as a child amongst the working men and women and their children. A confluence of ideas—sisters struggling with their relationship, multiple sclerosis that my own sister lived with, abuse, power imbalance between powerful men and those who work for them—came together. I use this setting and the orchard work to expose the unraveling of a marriage and a family as they make their jagged way back to a new whole.

The Goode Sisters is set in the working fruit orchards of Eastern Washington State and Chihuahua, Mexico with a thematic focus 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.

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