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I grew up in a small town, Kalona, in southeastern Iowa in the 1940s and 1950s, immersed in a family unit of parents and three older siblings, a Mennonite church, and a rural community. In 1962 I graduated from Iowa Mennonite School, and four years later I earned a college degree from Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana, with a major in English and a minor in physical education. After living a rather conventional life, albeit nineteen years in Appalachia, I went back to grad school in mid-life and received an M.A. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1998) from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.
I’ve published stories, poems, and essays in small presses, but the novel form is my writing preference. After working with historical material in Eyes at the Window, I’ve enjoyed the shift to a contemporary setting in Everyday Mercies. Now the first two books have been published in my trilogy of historical fiction set during the Civil War in the U.S. The trilogy, Scruples on the Line, should be complete by the fall of 2021.
My interests in education continue, even though I’m now retired from teaching. I’ve worked in high school, community college, and university settings, most recently teaching composition and creative writing/fiction writing classes for ten years at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. In addition, I enjoy my two daughters and four grandchildren. Relaxation comes for me by reading, gardening, watching movies and sports on TV, taking photos, and traveling.
After reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, a number of years ago, I decided I wanted to start my own black raspberry patch. I could add that to my gardening efforts and my voluntary reduction of meat consumption. So now every spring I weed my black raspberry plants, every summer I water them, every fall I cut out the old canes and prune the new ones for next year. But the plants do their own thing, producing fruit that pleases my taste buds. What shows up inside a book’s covers also results from creating sentences, following where they lead, pruning the dead stuff, and taming the mind’s excesses that want to escape their boundaries. How successfully that occurs depends on many factors: the range and limits of my perception, the tastes and receptivity of readers. It’s an exciting adventure when words and ideas move beyond dreams and bring people together.
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