Autobiographical Notes

I was a cocktail waitress on an island in the Aleutians. I went for adventure and romance, and found myself slinging drinks at the Elbow Room, a bar Playboy rated the "most despicable" in America. Growing up in Alaska and spending summers commercial fishing, I was familiar with the mud and sleaze of Alaska's fishing towns. But Dutch Harbor was like nothing else. I saved thousands of dollars in tips and left the man I'd come for. I went on to the University of Missouri, Columbia, School of Journalism, graduating cum laude. My first newspaper-reporting job took me to upstate New York to cover rough-and-tumble, Italian-Irish politics. Two years later, I moved to Montana and began freelancing, seeking time to play with words and subjects that intrigued me. My work has appeared in "National Geographic World," "Backpacker," "Boy's Life," "Icon," "Women's World" and others. I have eight non-fiction books in print, including three literary biographies in Harold Bloom's BioCritiques college library series for Chelsea House Publishers.

My current project, and first novel, AND SHE WAS is a fusion of my journalistic training and my wayward past. The researcher in me pored through Aleutian anthropological papers and explorers' journals, while the cocktail waitress in me remembered the seamy side of the 80s -- the dim bars thudding with Judas Priest, the coke-streaked mirrors, and how it feels to stand on an island at the edge of the world with no where to go.

AND SHE WAS is the story of a loose, blonde cocktail waitress mired in a life of easy men and endless parties. She follows a fisherman to a remote boomtown in the Aleutian Islands, where long ago three Aleut women began a conspiracy of killing that still clings to the foggy hills. The remnants and ghosts of this conspiracy become the hand that pushes her forward. Its imprint is the slick residue on which her future slides. The combination of these two voices -- the trashy blonde and the haunted Aleut women --is intimate and epic; modern and ancient.

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