I am a native of the Great Plains, having grown up on a farm in the Platte River Valley of western Nebraska. I love the wild beauty of the Plains and nearby Rocky Mountains--the too hot, too cold, too empty, too full of life extremes. Typically, the awesomely diverse and the awesomely stark are much the same, even as they are different. Although I have lived in Michigan, North Carolina, and British Columbia, the western plains, mountains, and desert are in my heart. As my day job, I am a faculty member and administrator in higher education. Teaching broadly in the liberal arts, including creative writing, my professional publications include educational materials, poems, and 28 stories for young readers. I am a member of SCBWI. As an author, I'm drawn to eccentric, unexpected characters: those who surprise because they hear a distant galaxy, see a different music, create their own fragrance rather than get hooked on a soundtrack; the child who has her own ideas about how the emperor is dressed; the lunatics and rebels who tell stories on the boundaries. I seek to write unusual stories that take readers to worlds they never imagined--a whole new ride. I currently have the following fantasy novels available: Helga: Out of Hedgelands (Wood Cow Chronicles, #1) The Overending (Wood Cow Chronicles, #2) Silversion (Wood Cow Chronicles, #3) coming in February 2015. One of the attractions of writing fantasy is that it forces us to experiment with "beyond the box" thinking. Imagination is often the only tool we have in breaking through the barriers or chains that limit our possibilities. Running on imagination, our minds and hearts are no longer bound by such "obvious" constraints as common sense, the speed of light, or prejudices of mind. A natural relative of fantasy is the sense of humor, and need to play, that are part of human nature. Like fantasy, humor is a matter of skewing how we look, and re-look, at things we normally take for granted. In my writing, I use fantasy and humorous absurdity to poke holes in the expectations cultures create to keep things in their place. Fantasy, including the idea that cows might think, talk, and are proper heroines--perhaps encourages us to wonder about other creatures, people, and dimensions of thought that "common sense" keeps us from hearing and seeing. Possibly, we may even discover that there are cows within ourselves waiting to speak and be heroic. Our capacity to hear things that are, in our "common sense" world, unheard and unheard of, is one of the degrees of freedom we can preserve for ourselves and offer to others. And, for children--kids of all ages--these degrees of freedom are precious and worth nurturing. That is why I write.

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