My parents were adventurers. In my lifetime, the only time they truly got along was when traveling. They lived in separate houses 400 miles apart, but remained married, and traveled together a lot.
Crouching behind the suitcase to get out of the wind.
The way we camped was to pack the trunk of the car with sleeping bags, a stove, a tent, water, gasoline, and a box of food, then drive–only backroads– highways were for tourists, not adventurers. When it came time to sleep, they’d pick a spot that seemed safe and secluded to put our sleeping bags on the ground if there was no rain, tents if there were. I’m pretty sure we were trespassing in farmer’s fields much of the time, and that was mostly okay in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, as was sleeping on the side of the road.
Sometimes, people DID consider it trespassing, as when some shepherds in Turkey attacked us in the night and we had to make a getaway across a river, but that was before I was born.
My novel Blue Woman Burning (due out in December 2021), is partly autobiographical, and starts with one such trek from Santiago, Chile to Oneonta, New York, in a Dodge Dart sedan. 12,000 miles. Took us six weeks.
I’m thirteen, and washing the dishes with my older brother somewhere on the altiplano between Chile and Bolivia.
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My novel Blue Woman Burning was published by Emperor Books, an imprint of Red Penguin Books, in the fall of 2021: "In the cold descending breeze of the Altiplano between Chile and Bolivia, Fallon’s narcissistic mother bursts into flames before her family’s eyes. The inexplicable nature of their loss marks each family member in a different way."
Against the Grain, my latest novel, will be released on Earth Day 2022: “Against the Grain combines gorgeous poetry and romance with heart-stopping action, as the daughter of a rich CEO joins forces with a logger’s son to stop a huge lumber company from destroying an ancient redwood forest. The trees themselves become surprisingly powerful characters in this rich, multilayered novel. After reading Against the Grain, you’ll never look at a tree in the same way again,” says Matt Witten, bestselling author of The Necklace.
My book of short stories, Strange Appetites, won the Adirondack Center for Writing People's Choice Award.
I love all that is absurd, odd, and beautiful.
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