About
I make stuff, mostly books but also dinner and sweaters and (lately) houses. I earned tenure as a professor of religious studies, and I love teaching. For some years, I lived (alternating with a sister) with my parents taking them through their aging and deaths. I make/write full-time now. Most of my publishing reflects my academic background in religious studies, particularly biblical studies, and most particularly the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. I also developed a practice for people suffering eco-anxiety/eco-grief to help move back to joy with strength (and yes, still with the grief) to continue the work of defending what is wild. I’m passionate about food and environmental issues, too. (Here’s a link to my Pretty Good Kitchen site.) Don’t we all end up in the kitchen, after all? I’m also writing quite a bit of fiction – some historical, set in the ancient world out of which the Bible came (a four-volume Babylon/Persia saga); some contemporary (e.g., a road-trip novel featuring a woman at a crossroads and her son-scratch-that daughter); another of speculative fiction with time travel imagining a world in which things have “gone right” returning us to a verdant, sustainable, just, and beautiful dynamic world; and some screenplays, too (including an award-winning bio-pic of Harriet Tubman). If you’re interested in having me talk with your group, please click the “contact” link. I welcome opportunities to share the eco-grief practice with those who feel a need for such and to speak with all sorts of people, not only out of my academic interests but also about writing and the creative life, in general. (Here’s a link to The Writer’s Story podcast that I co-host with my dear friend, Meredith Cole.) I live mostly in Charlottesville, Virginia with my husband, a dog, and a menagerie of wild kin. But I also spend time in Duluth, Minnesota, where I was born and raised.
Thus Far
For decades, I focused most of my creative energy in learning, teaching, and writing within the wonderfully interdisciplinary field of religious studies. I earned tenure as university professor, and would have been happy to continue in that way for the rest of my life. But life is full of surprises, and I’m thrilled that it’s given me opportunity to write without restriction, full-time and across genres.
For the Future
I aim to continue to make art, food, and sweaters and to continue to write across genres in ways that reflect both the specialized learning I’ve had rare opportunity to gain and other things about which I’m passionate or simply curious. These span everything from the environment to aging to music to dinner. Lately I’m having lots of fun with the Japanese forms of haiku, tanka, and haibun. Meanwhile, I orient ever more firmly in the direction of protecting and saving – however, whatever, and whomever I can – the wild of our precious earth. There is no such thing as too late.
Always
- to ask the big questions
- to make stuff
- seeking to go easy on the earth
- to respect the power of a good story well told
