I fell in love with words before I understood what love was.

By five, I was reading at a sixth-grade level. Not because I was pushed, but because I truly loved to read. I taught myself to write by copying my favorite stories, page by page, just to feel what it was like to create something. When I was a little older, my imagination took flight, and I developed ideas of my own.

Those early efforts are long destroyed. But pieces of them survived, buried in everything I write today.

Four years in Northern Idaho gave me Dresdencline. That landscape seeped into my bones and emerged transformed. Thirty years of practice taught me to trust my voice.

I don’t write what’s selling. I write what only I can see. I write what I yearn to say to the world.