I live in Berkeley, down the hill from the house once owned by my grandparents, a house designed in the 1950's by my aunt, one of the first women to graduate in architecture from UC Berkeley. I grew up along California's North Coast. I attended school in Portland when I was fourteen, and later Mills College and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) for college and graduate school. In my twenties, I traveled, living in Paris, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., where I made a living as a freelance editor and writer, participating for a time in the Capitol Hill Poetry Group, before returning to the West Coast to raise my children. My grandparents' grandparents' settled in Humboldt and Mendocino counties in the 19th century, where they farmed, raised cattle and harvested tan oak for leather. Both my parents attended one-room schools; the one in Branscomb still stands.
Early California is a subject of my book Swimming the Eel, just as the drama of family life is the subject of The Book of Gretel. In leaving behind the rural counties, I became a part of the human potential movement of the 1960's, and that movement perhaps more than anything shapes my life and my work. Since I was a teenager, I've kept journals, and I sometimes still return to those early notebooks for ideas. My poems appear in many literary reviews and magazines, including The Dark Horse, The Evansville Review, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Dos Passos Review, Arts & Letters, and others. I also review books and write essays on literature for various publications, including the Redwood Coast Review, Poetry Flash, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Colorado Review, and The Boxcar Poetry Review.