Look and Listen

Biography

I started out as a writer. Throughout my twenties and early thirties I studied literature, poetry and fiction. I earned an English degree and spent a post graduate year at a writer's center. In the 1980’s I published poems and short stories in small feminist journals, freelanced for an independent Seattle newspaper and wrote the novel destined for the bottom drawer. But the starving artist scene got old. After trying to earn a living as a counselor or store clerk or waitress or even a commercial diver, I eventually went back to school and earned a couple graduate degress in aquatic science. For the last several years I have worked in that field, most recently as a tenured professor. As such I published peer-reviewed technical papers and book chapters and edited reams of student writing. However, for me science writing and fiction are incompatible and I needed to abandon the one in order to be able to do the other. My fiction languished until a few years ago when I left my steady job to teach as an adjunct online. Now I again have time for fiction and I am writing as fast as I can to make up for all those lost years.

Inspiration

Life