Peggy Payne writes fiction about the intersection of sex and spirituality — to her surprise and no doubt that of everyone who was in high school with her.

The pattern didn’t become startlingly clear until she’d published her third novel, Cobalt Blue, and reached the supposedly staid age of 65.

By then she’d spent years as a travel writer, TV and newspaper reporter, magazine nonfiction writer, from Ms. Magazine and More to Travel & Leisure and Cosmopolitan. She also published in most of the major U.S. newspapers. After writing from more than 25 countries, she had expected to keep rambling about the world for the rest of her days.

But then came the overwhelming need to write fiction.

Peggy Payne now writes, and works with other writers, in a sunny office in the Historic Oakwood section at the edge of downtown Raleigh, NC. She drives home to a log house on a pond in rural Chatham County where she lives with her psychologist husband. From her husband’s special interest in clinical hypnosis, she learned much that contributed to her novel Sister India being repeatedly described by critics as “mesmerizing.”

A native of Wilmington, NC, she graduated from Duke University. She's a gardener, flat-water kayaker, beach-walker, and halting skier. And she reads quite a lot.