About
I was born in Alaska, raised in Oregon, where I studied history at Portland State University, and married in Hawaii. I’ve lived all over the United States—from California to Washington D.C., and the world, from Denmark, as a sixteen-year-old exchange student, to Japan, where my family and I lived nearly four years. Japan was an unbelievable experience. For the first six months, I felt as though we were in a National Geographic special—from food to sports to culture, everything seemed foreign. The longer I was there, however, and the more friends I made, the more I realized that people are the same: no matter what we look like on the outside or what language we speak, we have the same desires, the same fears, and the same concerns for our children and the future.
While living in Japan, I worked in a pottery factory one day a week—it was this rich experience which led me to write Echoes from a Falling Bridge, the first in my WWII trilogy.
Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I’d heard about the Japanese internment camps, but that knowledge never really impacted me. After moving to southwest Idaho, I was surprised to learn that Japanese internees and German and Italian POWs once worked the fields I could see from my windows. Then the local newspaper ran an article about former internees returning to Camp Minidoka on an annual pilgrimage. Camp Minidoka is a two-hour drive away—I was surrounded by WWII history. As a former history major, it was too much to resist. Thus, Harvest the Wind, the second novel in my WWII trilogy, was born. And eventually the third, Lotus Blossom Unfurling.
I’ve written three other novels: Patrimony and Two-Hearted Crossing, and Queenie’s Place, which was nominated for a National Book Award in Fiction, plus a collection of short stories titled Between Love and Hate and Other Stories. My short stories have appeared in Mooring Against the Tide, a creative writing textbook by Jeff Knorr and Tim Schell published by Prentice Hall, the Clackamas Literary Review, The Path, and Adelaide Literary Magazine. I've also had several non-fiction articles published in newspapers and magazines primarily focused on finance.
Featured Work
QUEENIE'S PLACE
QUEENIE'S PLACE, set in rural North Carolina in the early seventies, is the story of an unusual sisterhood between a thirty-something White woman from California and a fifty-something Black woman raised in the Jim Crow south. From the moment Doreen Donavan sees the WELCOME TO KLAN COUNTRY sign, North Carolina is one culture shock after another. She thinks the women she meets on the military base, where she and her family now live, are the dullest, stuffiest, most stuck-up women she's ever run across, and frankly, they don't think much of her either. She's hot, miserable, and bored. Then one day BAM, her car tire goes flat right in front of a roadhouse that caters to Black marines stationed at the military base. Inside, Queenie is holding forth on the piano. The place is jumping. Besides the music, there's dancing and the best barbeque in the state. Doreen's husband Tom arrives and must practically peel her out of the place. Queenie doesn't expect to see Doreen again, but back she comes and their unlikely friendship begins. Without warning, QUEENIE'S is closed, the women accused of bootlegging and prostitution. Doreen, a born crusader who cut her eye-teeth protesting the Vietnam War, even with Tom over there, dons her armor and mounts up. Things don't go according to plan.
