Thanks for checking out my author website. I’m an award winning independent journalist, non-fiction author and and novelist with a focus on contemporary family-drama fiction with an evocation on the Northern California landscape.
I was born and raised through my teenage years in a small and fairly obscure English market town on the borders of the Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire Fens. It was under those big skies and a seemingly endless, ancient horizon in which I absorbed such a deep sense of abiding place, back in my native Britain and in my long-time adopted home on the Pacific edge of the western United States.
After my start in provincial reporting in the UK and a brief 18-month stint as a regional press officer for the National Health Service in Cambridge, England, an unexpected relocation to California called when I followed my heart and my husband in the early years of our marriage to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ironically, I spent the first decade in the Bay Area immersed in British Elizabethan culture as media relations director with the Living History Center, producers of the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire. It was a wonderful segue into the arts and sub-culture of California and I look back on my initiation into life in the western states with gratitude and great memories.
Soon after, with three Bay-Area-born sons keeping me super busy, I gathered a bounty of delicious fodder for my South County Notebook — a popular lifestyle and culture column that I wrote for five years in my local newspaper, The Petaluma Argus Courier. I subsequently published my first non-fiction book Fog Valley Crush — Love at First Bite, in 2014 with material and interviews largely gleaned from my reporter’s notebooks packed with farm-to-table stories of my beat — the “Tastiest Little Place on Earth“, the artisan farm-centric micro-region of southern Sonoma County and coastal West Marin. Two years later, in 2016 I published my second book in the series, Independent Publishers Book Award winning Fog Valley Winter, Pioneer Heritage, Backroad Rambles and Vintage Recipes. Both books received the annual Editor’s Award from the Sonoma County Historical Society in 2017.
I wrote Big Green Country, my first novel, in part response to readers’ requests to fictionalize my prolific research and writing on Northern California’s rich farming culture and heritage. The agricultural wave to hit the region in 2017 inspired a gritty and pertinent suspense story set against the contemporary cannabis green-rush.
My latest work, a second novel, The House on Liberty Street — Home of Second Chances (released December 2022) is set in my adopted home town of Petaluma, Sonoma County and it’s a page-turning, adult multi-cultural contemporary fiction/suspense/family drama.
It’s Christmas Eve, 2019 and the world as we’ve known it is about to turn upside down. The House on Liberty Street — Home of Second Chances takes place within a compressed timeline of 24 hours with an epilogue, exploring timely themes of family, grief, prejudice, substance abuse, loyalty, love, spirituality, renewal, redemption and the hope for a better future. It is an evocative tale of resilient women with the promise of a better tomorrow. Adamaria, an Italian American widow reckons with her outdated ideals when a series of nighttime intrusions disturbs her Christmas Eve sleep. In the course of 24 hours, unresolved family issues and outdated bias reach a dramatic crescendo changing the lives of Adamaria, her daughter Gracie and Gracie’s two young daughters forever.
Click here to listen to a Jan 2023 podcast interview with me on From Sparks to Light discussing The House on Liberty Street, my writing process and how I began my writing career.