I've loved books since I was tiny -- my mother read to me when I was in my crib, and as soon as I could read for myself I crawled under the covers in my room with Winnie the Pooh, Charlotte's Web and more. Bliss. I wrote tiny little graphic books in elementary school and painted watercolors in high school (and read of course). One gift to...
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I've loved books since I was tiny -- my mother read to me when I was in my crib, and as soon as I could read for myself I crawled under the covers in my room with Winnie the Pooh, Charlotte's Web and more. Bliss. I wrote tiny little graphic books in elementary school and painted watercolors in high school (and read of course). One gift to readers like me in elementary school (I was in public school in Maryland) was the ability to order paperbacks through school, which introduced me to Poe among others. I continued to read voraciously - Thackeray, Austin, Orwell, Steinbeck, biographies, memoirs, whatever I could lay my hands on. But in I was also after real life, not just reading about it -- being there and experiencing it, which is what brought me to move to England, kept me racing sailboats, then marrying a very cute tugboat captain and eventually working on coastal tugs as a cook/deckhand, then becoming one of the first women in the country licensed by the US Coast Guard to run coastal tugs (200 tons, 200 miles offshore).
My first published essay appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, then, when I began having children and got off tugs, (someone had to stay home and screw up the kids) I started writing for WorkBoat magazine - maritime reporting and analysis -- Chesapeake Bay Magazine, Yachting, The Baltimore Sun, (garden and travel) House Beautiful, Coastal Living, Southern Living and more. My first published book was about the six years I spent working on coastal tugs. My second, Course of the Waterman, a novel, won the Fred Bonnie prize for the novel. My third, A Love Like No Other: Abigail and John Adams, A Modern Love Story, historical fiction based on a lot of research, grew out of my fascination with history and the real lives and passions and struggles of the people who lived it (rather than the sterile-looking dates we were handed in school). I'm now finishing a book with a hospice nurse that will be out in the next few months.
I'm a University of Maryland Master Gardener, and grow much of our fruits and vegetables as well as put them up for the winter. I'm also on the Sustainability Committee for the Garden Writers of America and am particularly interested in sustainable living and in how we as a species can make changes to get there. And still make life beautiful, interesting and fun.
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