I grew up in Queens, New York and wrote fiction up through my early 20s.  This was my first passion and I returned to it after my children reached their teen years. My first published novel, The Old Songs, takes place in Queens during the 1950s and early 1960s. Although I came of age in the years after those covered in this book, I did experience the turbulent effects of this era and heard the stories brought forth from it. One reviewer said the book read like a “gritty Anne Tyler novel.”

My latest novel, Bountiful Calling, is set in central Pennsylvania and was drawn from a variety of influences. While living in Harrisburg, Pa. I was involved in the anti-fracking movement. This was an excellent vantage point from which to see powerful business and government forces coalesce around the economic potential of fracking, but also its effects on individual people and communities.

One of my primary goals in my fiction is to avoid easy answers.  This is true when portraying the emotional interactions in The Old Songs, or the ideas swirling about in the action of Bountiful Calling. I try to carefully construct situations and characters so that at a certain point I can let them go to follow their destiny. This gives the reader the opportunity to reflect and decide what’s important, what rings with the sound of truth.

I’m now working on a new novel that builds upon the themes developed in Bountiful Calling.  It takes place in the not distant future and considers what happens when human and computing intelligence merges in a single consciousness.