Biography
Carrying only a backpack, a camera, and a sketchbook I arrived in Alaska Aboard the Alaska State Ferry. I'd long made a habit of telling myself stories about passing scenery. As I went north, with the mist of autumn over the fjords of the Inland Passage, the stories sang within me. This was the year of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. I heard Prince William Sound as a child, young William crying. What would he have said to Captain Hazelwood? What would William's mother have done? The idea slipped away from me in the wake of the ferry.
Making Anchorage my home, I continued to tell myself stories while I earned my second bachelor's degree, a BFA in sculpture, at the University of Anchorage Alaska -- my first degree was a BA in Arts and Humanities from Colorado State University. My BFA thesis show was of kinetic sculpture which attempted to bring together ideas about clothing and technology. The show wasn't all that successful; almost every piece in it shorted out, broke down, or leaked. But one of my pieces, a moving skirt made of wire, inspired a three-year-old girl to dance beside it.
At about that time, I fell in love with and married Mark Newell, an engineer and computer whiz. Our courtship revolved around building a garage. He gave me a digital camera and a drill press. Mark was the statewide coordinator for Netday Alaska. Together we installed computer networks and rode our tandem recumbent tricycle.
We were standing on the dock in Angoon, Alaska when I realized my stories had the makings of a novel, maybe several novels. Mark encouraged me to write them down and shared his technical expertise in getting the fictional technology to work -- or to at least seem like it would work.
Mark died several years ago, leaving me widowed. He'd had a rare degenerative neurological disorder, OPCA (olivopontocerebellar atrophy) ataxia, which caused loss of coordination and eventually death. I continued to write, incorporating my thoughts on love, death, and neurology into my writing.
