Meet The Author

I have always loved to read and always wanted to write. I began seriously pursuing my dream over 30 years ago, with pauses in the pursuit for various events and catastrophes.

I was the youngest of four children. My father worked for an international corporation. My mother lived the high life for many years in Latin America, with servants and glamorous evening gowns – I was born in Argentina and lived a year in Bolivia – but mostly I knew her as a suburban housewife.  She died when I was 23.

I went to high school at Abbot Academy, a small blue-stocking boarding school.  As a teenager, I loved boarding school, where I could live with my friends and not my stupid parents. Abbot was later swallowed up, to my considerable feminist resentment, by Phillips Academy, the large boys’ school in Andover.

It took me eight years to graduate from the University of Michigan, since I dropped out twice. The second time I was gone for three years and was briefly married to a French-Canadian man. Those were the glorious hippie days. We traveled through Europe, first hitchhiking and then living in a VW bus. When I got pregnant, we went back to Montreal.

I left Jean-Claude when my son was three months old to return to Ann Arbor and finish college. After I graduated, I went to Duke Law School. There were only ten women in the class of 150, and I felt defiantly out of place. I was still a hippie, and had a small group of friends who didn’t fit in to the jacket-and-tie-and-going-to-Wall-Street culture. I sat in the back row rolling cigarettes from a can of Top tobacco, and sometimes wore a bathrobe and newsboy cap to class.

For five years I worked at Jacksonville (Florida) Legal Aid. Until then I had only read about poverty, or seen its backyards from a train. My outrage at injustice was theoretical. Now I was meeting, one by one, all these people who were amazingly various in character, attitude, and situation but had one thing in common: they were desperately poor.

There was the 54-year-old woman who lost half her tongue, her upper palate, and the left side of her jaw to cancer, and it took her eleven months to get Social Security disability. The family of seven whose mobile home was repossessed so they moved into the cinder block garage the father had built. The couple whose grandchildren were removed from their home and put in foster care due to persistent head lice and a dirty kitchen – no exaggeration, and my own little boy brought head lice home at least twice a year. 

It took me five years to realize that someone who hated conflict shouldn’t practice law. I moved to Gainesville and got a job doing social policy research at UF’s College of Law. I became involved in community issues. I had a grant to organize welfare recipients and educate them about their rights. I chaired the board of the domestic violence shelter, and a task force on indigent health care that led to millions of dollars annually in volunteer medical services.

Eventually the job evolved so that I was teaching: feminist jurisprudence, family law, and my heart’s delight, poverty law. I also ran a fellowship program that placed students in paid externships in agencies working on poverty or environmental issues. It tended to attract the idealists, and I’m proud that many continued their involvement in similar work after they graduated.

When my son grew up and left home, I was able to focus on writing along with my paid job. I tried writing short stories, but I prefer the wide scope of a novel, getting lost for years in a fictional world. I wrote one, and had started another when two foster children came to live with me. I put down the writing for a couple of years, but the characters lingered at the edge of my mind, waiting for me to return. When both the children were gone, I did. Then I retired from the law school, began writing my blog, The Feminist Grandma, and finished a third novel.

All this time, I tried earnestly to get published – submitting stories, writing dozens of publishers and hundreds of agents. For a few years I had an agent for my second book, but she couldn’t persuade any of the big publishers, and wasn’t interested in the small ones.

Now I’m in my seventies, and my first novel is being published. Through all the hoping years I read about the publishing industry, and thought about what I wanted. My dream was to have a real editor, who would help me make my book as good as it can be, and my dream has come true.

I’m working very hard now. It’s so much easier to keep at it when I know I may have readers. I get up early, excited about my tasks for the day, and work for hours. Though most of my mornings are occupied with the publishing side – webpage design, planning promotion, responding to edits – when I have a morning for writing, my ideas tumble over each other, and the words flow.

I haven’t lost my obsession with poverty. About 18 years ago a group of us started the HOME Van, driving to campsites and parks with food, medicine, clothes, tents and friendship for Gainesville’s homeless people. It was a huge enterprise, and as we all got older, and some of us sicker, we’ve had to cut back drastically. Now we have only a monthly food pantry, but the work still feeds my heart.

For fun I love to garden, cook, sing, swim, crochet hats for the homeless, babysit for an adorable three-year-old, and walk in the woods. With my husband Joe Jackson I’m raising our 16-year-old granddaughter. My son, a private investigator, lives a few blocks away. We have two cats who snuggle with me as I work. My younger brother and my sister have died, but I still have my oldest brother, two sisters-in-law, seven beloved nieces and nephews, a foster son who frequently writes me, a superb step-daughter and her little girl, and the rest of Joe’s large and welcoming family. I have a gang of friends, the Muumuu Mamas, and other women friends who are dear to me. Despite losses and struggles, I think I am happier than I have ever been.

So that’s enough about me. Let’s hear about you.