My father was a smart and insightful man who read voraciously and indiscriminately. He was a World War II B-17 pilot who was as conversant with the latest private-eye novel as he was with the classics, as familiar with ancient biographies as he was with popular fiction. He loved the act of reading, of gathering information. My mother was a "word" person who wrote poems for birthdays and anniversaries, played Scrabble with a vengeance, and corrected my grammar like a woman possessed.

My response to their appreciation of the written word was to read a grand total of one book from cover to cover during my entire four years of high school, opting rather to invent titles for reports, as well as stories to go with them, and to choose my authors from the pages of the Boise telephone directory. Obviously I got into this storytelling business out of a definite and specific need.

I think it is no coincidence that the one book I did read in high school was To Kill a Mockingbird, because fifteen years after I graduated from college, became semi-literate, and decided to become a storyteller, stories like Harper Lee's were the only kind I had any desire to tell - stories about real life as I see it, about my sense of justice and injustice.

As is true for all writers, my work is colored by the parts of life with which I've chosen to surround myself. I spent nearly ten years in Oakland, California, as Director of a K-12 alternative school for inner city kids who for one reason or another couldn't make it in the public school system. One More Last Chance High School in The Crazy Horse Electric Game was drawn directly from my experiences there. I chose to leave urban America when I realized that about a third of my life was being spent standing in line, so I headed back to the Northwest, where I had been a sociology and psychology major at Eastern Washington State College fifteen years earlier. (In reality, and my grade-point average bears this out, I majored in swimming.) In Spokane, Washington, I took a job as a child and family therapist in a mental health center, where I worked for twelve years, focusing on families involved in child abuse and domestic violence. I continue as a chairperson for the Spokane Child Protection Team.

What I believe I have gained, and what I hope my writing reflects, from working these past twenty years with people in difficult situations is a sense of the connection between all human beings - the ghastly as well as the glorious, an awareness of the damage we do as a society creating unreal expectations for ourselves, and a different perspective on the true nature of courage. For me, those things are worth exploring and writing about.

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