About Me

I’m proud to be a ninth-generation Carolinian. My mother’s family has lived in the Carolinas since before the American Revolution. That’s my maternal great-great-grandfather on the far left in the photograph. My grandmother is on the far right. Telling stories is practically a civic obligation in the South, and after being steeped in stories throughout my childhood, becoming a writer seemed as natural as breathing. I wrote my first book when I was in the third grade. I can’t remember anything about the book itself, but I remember the thrill of having written one.

This photo was taken at the boarding house that my parents managed in the small town of Monroe, North Carolina, in the late 1950s. We lived in the family quarters at the back of the first floor. Boarders lived in rooms on the second floor and joined my family in the dining room for supper, which my mother cooked. It was during those boarding house meals that I developed my fondness for banana pudding (recipe available upon request). The boarders included a man who wandered the country as an itinerant preacher, spreading the Gospel, and a team of James Dean-look-alikes who came to Monroe to paint the town water tower. Having strange characters wandering in and out of the house seemed perfectly normal to me, and it was great training for a budding writer.

My father became a parent relatively late in life (he was 46 when I was born), which gave him time to have many exciting adventures to share with me when I was a little girl. He’d prospected for gold out West, and he’d volunteered for the army during World War II. He was a writer and an editor for Family Handyman Magazine, working from home long before it became fashionable. I sometimes sat on his lap as he typed on an old manual typewriter, where I acquired a fascination with the magic of putting words on a page.

This photo shows my mother in front of the Sanitary Grill in Monroe, North Carolina, before I was born. I always thought it was funny that a restaurant would make a point of saying it was sanitary … until the news headlines of the 1990s about E. coli and hepatitis infections contracted in restaurants. Mama was a singer with a country music band when she met Daddy. My siblings and I used to beg her to sing Old Shep and other sad story songs over and over again because we loved how sad they made us feel, and we giggled over the lyrics of Mairzy Doats and other nonsense songs popular in the 1950s. Listening to my mother sing gave me a love for stories and for silly word play.

This is the first known photograph of me with a feline companion (there would be many more to come). I regret that I do not remember the name of this particular cat, but I can tell you the names of all the other cats who have graced my life in almost 50 years of being a devoted momcat:  Kitty, Monkey Kitten, Spunky, Sprinkle, Tidbit, Errol, Betty, Rudy, Humphrey, Charlie, Harry, Buddy, Monty, Nicky, Little Black Cat, Medium Black Cat, and Dixie. If you’d like to know the complete life history of any of them, just ask!  I can tell you cat stories till you beg for mercy.

My mother had, at most, a fifth-grade education, but she loved to read. We lived a hardscrabble life after my father died when I was ten, but my mother always made sure we had plenty of books and magazines to read, often bringing home boxes of them from the thrift store. She scraped together the money to buy books from the Scholastic Book Fair for my siblings and me, and she read every book we ordered along with us. She was proud of me when I graduated from high school and went on to earn three college degrees. I don’t think she ever knew how much her own love of reading contributed to my academic success.

After many years of urban life, I’ve returned to my rural Southern roots. I now live in the mountains of North Carolina, where wild turkeys perform mating rituals in my yard each spring and half a dozen waterfalls are just a short drive away. I earned degrees in nutrition, public health, and instructional design, but now I use the skills I learned in high school — how to write and how to sew — to shape a lifetime of experiences into children’s books, personal essays, and fabric art. I also bake luscious desserts as often as possible!