Who I Am:

I grew up in Seattle in a family of six kids and we all had our favorite reading materials. My older sister read Dostoevsky and Hollywood gossip magazines; one brother liked Popular Mechanics. Comic books lay on every surface, along with Dad’s medical biology textbooks with gruesome pictures, Mom’s Chekhov, my younger brother’s Norse epics. I read everything indiscriminately. Later, when my teachers asked if I knew an author, I would say “no,” then realize that I’d read all the Thomas Mann, for example, from my sister’s bedside table.

My husband and I live in Menlo Park, California, where we raised two sons, both readers.

I teach literature and humanities at Menlo College. My students, who come from diverse backgrounds, have taught me new ways to look at fiction.

How I Write:

I bought my first car, a used Toyota Corolla, for the price of a luxury meal. I was 22.

That car held books, a few lovers who didn’t complain too much about where to put their long legs, and the BLTs I wolfed while speeding up the San Francisco Peninsula to my first job at a bank (fired, unable to grasp the seriousness of precise numbers). The car had a small crack in the radiator and eventually died when the engine over-heated for the last time. 

I often think of that car when I write. The joy of following a heavy rainstorm to the coast. Surprising a friend. Telling nobody where I am.

I start with a list of employee rules on the back wall of a hardware store, a younger sibling’s disappointment, a scrap of conversation between strangers. Landscape matters. Until age ten, my family of eight lived in Horicon, Wisconsin, a town that featured a yearly hunters’ contest for the longest pheasant feather. I see the slough, the Canada geese landing their big bodies. Or maybe I’ll go to Seattle, where I was a teenager. The big house, people providing slight breaks in the water from above and all around—Puget Sound, Lake Washington, the Olympic rainforest.

The characters ride shotgun, neither of us aware of the crack. Yet. While they sleep against the window, I imagine their lives. We are completely free, like having a first car. For all my carefulness at home, deep in their story, I can go anywhere.

I am ruthless. I dump characters, long scenes, everything on the side of the road. I only keep the ones who wake up and let me pry out the sources of their fears and their strengths.

My characters often don’t know how to talk to themselves. They face losses. The catastrophe of a lost mother. The shredding of a middle-aged man’s belief that his life will culminate. 

As a kid, I read my mother’s books indiscriminately, rarely even glancing at the author’s names. In school, I was often assigned authors utterly unfamiliar to me, only to find that their stories had been in my mother’s library. Chekhov was one of those I met again. My favorite story is often translated as “Grief.” In it, the taxi driver Iona tries to tell his fares about the death of his son. They don’t listen. Iona wants to talk of it “properly, with deliberation.” He wants a listener to “sigh and exclaim and lament.” 

Though many of my stories spring from loss, the characters spend most of their time exclaiming over each other’s lies, outlandish hopes, their crazy, funny stories. Sometimes there’s a touch in the car--a question--and they sigh.