About
I was born and raised as one of six children in Kentucky. In my family, there was little money, and I paid my own way through an education in engineering then a PhD at the University of Kentucky. I worked for three decades in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as a scientist then an executive. After surviving the era of COVID and a large layoff at my company, I reached 2022 exhausted by countless hours in meetings on Zoom. One day in that trying time, I recalled being asked as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. On some days, that young version of me would confidently say “a doctor,” by which I meant a scientist. On others, I would say, just as confidently, “a lawyer,” by which I meant a writer.
The impetus to finally devote my days to writing fiction was sparked by two quotes from my journals and a historical event. In BELOVED, Paul D. refers to a fictional Delaware town as “the meanest place for Negroes he had ever seen outside Pulaski County, Kentucky." I was born in that same Pulaski County, where Morrison’s infamous Sweet Home was projected to exist. It was jarring to read Morrison’s condemnation. Why choose that place? In Harriette Arnow's, OLD BURNSIDE, she says, "The empty point of land between the rivers became Point Isabel. One story goes that a lovelorn girl named Isabel leaped into the river to her death...but the tale remains only a tale." Why would they name a town after such a girl? And how could you resist putting that girl on that bluff and then walking her backwards through an imaginary life to uncover what drove her there? Finally, my mother’s family was forced from a farm they had inherited from generations prior by the creation of the Wolfe Creek Dam and Lake Cumberland in south-central Kentucky. What did that feel like to my grandfather and those that had farmed there for a century? With the merging of these thoughts, I found myself traveling back to 1950 and connecting that time to a fictional place near the Cumberland River in the nineteenth century to create the dual-timeline story that is ISABELLE’S POINT.
My training as a writer came on the job through the demand for technical documents. And, as a scientist in biotech companies for three decades, I wrote countless reports, publications, regulatory filings, and patents. I always loved the process of writing even those dry documents and used that as the outlet for the writer in me, much to the chagrin of the poor scientists who endured my heavy edits in the simplest of reports. Nonetheless, I have been an avid reader of novels, and historical fiction in particular, and guided my own training in the craft of writing fiction through lengthy programs at Grub Street in Boston and The Book Incubator online, while attending countless other training sessions. All the while, I attended writing conferences at every opportunity and was always drawn to go back because I felt at home there. Finally, I have learned a great deal about who I am as a writer from the three editors with whom I have worked to develop the manuscript that is ISABELLE’S POINT. I am on to the next step now and looking for the right representation to help me introduce my writing to the world of readers.
