About
My work most frequently arises out of passion and curiosity surrounding a particular issue, which leads to research, which in turn sparks my imagination. I search for the unusual angle, something overlooked in the history of a time or place. Often this fresh angle comes through locating the work in the lives of ordinary people whose stories have been lost or ignored, with the goal of enlarging our engagement with wider, unfamiliar worlds.
My novel, THE LAST WHALER (forthcoming in September 2024 from Regal House Publishing), is set on the Svalbard archipelago where in June 2017 I had the privilege of sharing The Arctic Circle Summer Solstice residency with artists and scientists aboard the barquentine ANTIGUA. A retrospective narrative set in the 1930s and 40s, the story concerns a widower-whaler's exploration of guilt both over his wife's death and his time hunting beluga whales at a remote site on Svalbard.
Another example is my novel in stories FALLING THROUGH THE NEW WORLD (Gold Wake Press 2024), which arose out of a fascination with my personal history as the American granddaughter of Italian immigrants and the events that spurred that history—World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. My mother often told the story of her own mother surviving the epidemic while her sister perished, calling for water to quench her thirst until her last breath. That image of two sisters sharing very different fates traveled with me down the years until I could finally understand enough about Italian history and that country's involvement in World War I to write about their impact on my characters' lives, primarily through the lenses of the stories' female protagonists.
My novella BADLANDS (Miami University Press 2007) was inspired in part by a passage in Melvin Gilmore's "The Truth of the Wounded Knee Massacre" regarding the genocide of American Indians there in 1890: "There were about four hundred people in Big Foot's band. [...] Of the victims, there were 164 bodies buried at Wounded Knee [and] about one hundred survivors. The rest were not accounted for." I was haunted by the idea of these 136 "disappeared" human beings. An image emerged of one such young woman, an infant strapped to her chest, dying while trying to protect her baby. From there, the novella evolved, exploring the central idea of how external events forever alter private lives.
My short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared widely. I've been awarded residencies to the Arctic Circle's 2017 Summer Solstice Expedition, Hawthornden Castle, Galleri Svalbard, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA program, I taught in Bryn Mawr College's Creative Writing Program and Rosemont College's MFA program. In August 2024, I will be participating in the Arctic Circle Alumni Expedition set to circumnavigate Svalbard. I live with my husband in Camden, Maine.