As a child, I was inspired by Jo March of “Little Women.” She was strong and forthright—and she wrote novels! But as a teenager, I found myself at an extraordinary program in Oaxaca, Mexico, and became so enamored with that region that I began training as an anthropologist. But I was impatient. After receiving a master’s degree I went out into the world as a journalist, eventually working also as an oral historian, an editor—and now, finally, I can call myself a novelist. “Brooding with Storm Clouds,” my first published novel, is coming out in July of 2026. Even more gratifying, it is subtitled “Return to Oaxaca,” combining my two earliest desires. As a journalist I’ve written cover stories for Smithsonian and Natural History magazines, been a correspondent for the Boston Globe, among other newspapers, and written for many periodicals including Christian Science Monitor, Horizon, Maine Boats Homes and Harbors, American Photographer, Art New England, Fiberarts, Letter Arts Review, Metalsmith, Parabola, Resurgence, and many more outlets. In 2004 I founded COA, the award-winning magazine of College of the Atlantic, which I edited until I retired from the college at the end of 2017. As an oral historian, I have interviewed craft artists for the Smithsonian Institution’s Nanette Laitman Archives of American Art, the Maine Community Foundation, and numerous families and communities, through my small business, Personal History. Though raised outside of New York City, I’ve lived in Maine for more than half my life, most of it in a century-old, wood-heated home overlooking Penobscot Bay.