I never aspired to become a New York Times bestselling author.

I write much too slowly for that.  Like Philip Roth’s infamous doppelganger Nathan Zuckerman in The Ghostwriter, I can spend days ‘turning around’ a single sentence; a week or more on a paragraph.  Instead of trying to write books I hope will sell a million copies, I write about the things that matter most to me, compelled by the notion that they might also matter to readers.

I was born in northern Maine in the middle of the 20th century, the second oldest of what became a brood of eight, facts crucial to who I am as a writer.

(It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts. Angela Carter, The Werewolf.)

I was born a searcher, forever in conflict with my rigid Scots-Irish Catholic family. Mysterious yearnings drove me. We moved often through states in the northeast, never quite settling anywhere.  Each move was an uprooting. I struggled to find my footing wherever we landed.  Coming of age in the late ‘60s, I was steeped in turbulence both at home and in the world.  Sometimes I was an unwitting or deliberate provocateur; other times a victim, and always a witness.  All of these emerge in my writing.

In my novels, short stories and essays I meditate on the experiences of ordinary people.

I hover deep inside their private lives, lives that almost always mirror larger issues in the world. My characters – like those in my story collection, and the female protagonists of my novels - are multi-layered and contradictory; an amalgam of good and evil.  They are often confused about their place in the world and they struggle to find a stable sense of self. They obsess over fraught relationships, moral yearnings, crazy loves and flimsy hatreds. No matter how difficult their situations, they confront experience with sharp eyes, ironic wit, and a potent sense - sometimes furious, other times befuddled - of their own historical matrix.

I grew up in a family without stories, one reticent about its restlessness, its struggles, and its many migrations and also about its hopes and dreams.

In my writing I’ve tried to fracture this long history of evasions and equivocations, secrets and silence.  That’s why I write from a place deep inside my heart.  Besotted with written language, I began my writing life as a poet and I have worked hard for many years to deepen and develop its use. I hope that my prose glistens with memorable imagery and the patterns of figurative language I have worked so hard to create.