Frequently Asked Questions
Where did you grow up, go to school?
I grew up in Baltimore, although my family spent several years in Kentucky and on Long Island when I was a child. I went to Friends School. Thanks to a radical and wonderful high-school teacher, I got interested in the Russian language and ended up majoring in Russian at Boston University and got my Masters degree in Russian at San Diego State University, even taught it for a year. The culmination of my Russian language career was being hired as an interpreter for the New York City ballet, planning a tour of Leningrad, and passing a CIA exam. The tour was cancelled when the former Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia so I went to Paris instead, living there for a year and studying French and art. I returned to the U.S. in 1976 and began writing and teaching about French cooking. In 1980, I opened a natural foods cooking school in the San Francisco Bay Area. When the school closed because of the eighties recession, I began writing cookbooks. I switched to fiction in 1990 and got my MFA in creative writing from Goddard College in 2007.
Where do you live now?
I divide my time between Connecticut and New Hampshire.
What came first, writing or painting?
Painting came first. I won my first art contest at twelve. Art was my favorite subject in high school and college, and my family encouraged me to explore all the arts, including writing and music. In college I studied at Boston University's School of Fine Arts, and although my teachers there encouraged me to switch my major to painting, I still carried an unreasonable obsession for Russian and went on to finish that degree.
Writing never came easily. It began as a career change after my year in France, when I was asked to write a column on French cooking for a local magazine and discovered I enjoyed it a lot. A publisher approached me to put together a cookbook and that became other books. I wrote my first memoir in 1989 and my first novel in 2006.
What's your greatest creative influence--what writers do you admire? What artists?
My writing influences include a range of writers of all genres, from poets Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry, novelists Michael Cunningham and Amy Bloom, to short story writers Amy Hempl and Alice Munro.
Although I admire painters Andrew Wyeth, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, and Mary Cassatt, among others, my greatest influence as a painter was Susan Sarback, founder of the School of Light & Color.
What are you reading?
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Conagher by Louis L'Amour
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
among others
Where and when do you write? Do you write on the computer or by hand?
I freewrite by hand in a writer's notebook, creating my initial scene ideas, then transfer them to the computer for development and revision. Once a book is formed into rough draft, it all takes place on the computer. I print out drafts and edit them by hand, though, since it's hard to catch pacing errors on the screen.
I write best in the early mornings. Favorite places to write include sitting on the screened porch of my home or at the local library's corner table.