Who I Am

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.   C. S. Lewis

Some writers begin with a character, some with a plot.  My author journey began with a landscape. The Blue Ridge foothills have been my home for almost 30 years, long enough to know how the place holds loss—quietly, without drama, the way the mountains themselves endure.  Enduring Fire grew from that knowledge.  

A half century career in medicine taught me that people reveal themselves most fully not in what they say, but in what they cannot quite bring themselves to do.  I write the books I couldn’t find elsewhere.  When I’m not writing, I paint in watercolor, play Celtic harp, grow herbs and flowers on my farm, and enjoy hiking and exploring in the Shenandoah  National Park and the valley it overlooks.

What I Write

First love. Earned love. Love realized almost too late.  My novels explore love not as a refuge from the world, but as the place where the world's full weight is most deeply felt.  

Across different times and places, my stories are inhabited by men and women whose lives are shaped by the institutions and ideologies of their time.  From Depression-era Virginia to the eugenics laboratories of Cold Spring Harbor, the first three books in a series stand alone, but all ask the same essential question: when a defining moment arrives, what choices are you willing to make when everything you are — and everything you love — is put to the test?

The first of the series, Enduring Fire is set in Virginia's Blue Ridge in 1935, the year before the Shenandoah National Park opens.  It follows one young man's moral awakening in the shadow of a mountain world about to disappear.  The love woven throughout is the kind that doesn't announce itself, but burns long after everything else has gone cold.