Like other military families, we moved around. Images from a childhood spent in the South include Alabama’s red dirt, roadside buttercups, the rattlesnake we discovered while blackberry picking, and a man and a mule plowing a small cotton field across the street. In Virginia’s rich soil, my mother grew bumper crops of vegetables, gigantic peonies, and pure white moon vine flowers that unfurled and bloomed in the black of night. In the woods behind our house in Oakton (then country, now a D.C. suburb) the clear call of quail carried through the stillness of mornings and dusk. A black oscillating Myers fan made blistering hot summer afternoons tolerable enough for naps and reading comics and library books.
I was sixteen when my father was transferred to Boston’s First Naval District. We found a house in Hingham at the edge of a salt marsh. I learned to avoid horseshoe crabs and barnacles while swimming at the small rocky beach at the end of our street, and to smell the difference between high tide (saltwater) and low tide (muck). In 1964 my father retired from the Navy to become public relations director at the Woods Hole Ocean Institution, and we came to Cape Cod. Aside from childhood years and brief stays in Maine, Michigan, and Western Massachusetts, I’ve lived happily on this sandy peninsula.
I’ve written professionally since the late 1960s when I was hired as a stringer by John Cole, the crusty editor of the Bath-Brunswick Times Record in Brunswick, Maine. Later, when my two sons were young, I wrote hundreds of articles as a stringer for the Cape Cod Times. Magazine assignments for regional and national publications followed. Along the way, I worked in marketing for a business software company and in public relations for a municipal wastewater project.
Looking back, I realize I have always been writing. (I started keeping a dairy when I was 10.) The past four and a half years have been devoted exclusively to the research and writing of Nature’s Ambassador: The Legacy of Thornton W. Burgess. My 320-page biography of the renowned 20th century children’s author and influential naturalist was released by Schiffer Publishing in August 2013. In the immediate future I’ll be promoting Nature’s Ambassador through book signings, talks, blogs, and articles. And after that? More writing, of course! I have both adult and children’s books in various stages of readiness.
I received a B.A. in English from Hobart & William Smith Colleges. After I earned an M.A. in Professional Writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, I taught writing as adjunct faculty at UMass Dartmouth and Cape Cod Community College.
