Tell
me about yourself. Your book(s), your life, your inspiration.
To tell you about myself is to string together one seemingly
less fortunate event to the very fortunate one that could only follow if the
first one occurred.
I was born with ‘flat feet’. The doctor suggested dancing as
a therapy. And thus I entered the world of ballet. Eventually, at 15, I would
dance solo roles with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and American Festival Ballet .
And then I had an injury. In my early twenties, while
dancing, I broke my Achilles tendon. But a wonderful nurse somehow encouraged
me, and I went to nursing school. Having
an RN enabled me to continue traveling and to live in NYC, LA, and Boston. It
was in Los Angeles that I met my husband and moved to Florida.
We didn’t have children of our own, but adopted three
wonderful ones. And while home being a
mother, I had the time to develop some other skills. I began to paint more and show my art work in
juried shows, winning a number of Best of Shows and Honorable mentions for
watercolors. And I took up the cello,
later playing for 14 years with the Tampa Bay Symphony. I hired a teacher and
polished my French. Then started Italian.
And then my marriage ended. But amazingly, in the orchestra
I had joined, I met a violinist. He turned out to be an amazing man who owned
wonderful boats, and soon, I too became a sailor. It was on one of our trips sailing through
the islands to Venezuela that we visited the island off the coast of Trinidad
where my first novel takes place. I also began to write for the St. Petersburg
Times and other newspapers, doing travel and features pieces; dance pieces for
Dance Magazine; sailing articles for Sailing Magazine.
I now live in Tallahassee. I have discovered Argentine Tango
and Flamenco dance. I play with the Big Bend Orchestra. My art is in the 1020
Gallery. I write for the Democrat on an ad hoc basis and for several magazines,
including Florida Design, Tallahassee Magazine, Palm Beach Magazine.
So those are the facts. But the astounding thing about
living them is that like Russian nesting dolls each must fit within the
other…except that I sense I’ve done things from the inside out!
Land Without Mirrors is my first effort at writing a book. I
had won awards for short stories, but the experience of living with characters
for a long time was unique. Each morning
when I would sit down to write felt like opening a door on a room peopled by
interesting folks who’d been "planning" things all night long. God knows what
went on in that room…but as I began to type, the characters chatted and chastened
and had their way. I’m sorry to leave
them for now.
Inspiration is…well, everywhere. It is in wonderful words
that pout if not used. It is in the spotted red leaves I look out on as I
write. It’s in music—the sound of words’ rhythms, the cadence of a man’s walk,
the half-formed conversations I snap off and take with me as I walk through a
train station. It is also in the people I’ve known, and lost, and forgotten,
and wish I could resurrect.
Where
do you see your writing taking you in the future?
Impulsively, following a return from sailing in Greece, I
submitted a long travel/feature article to the St. Petersburg Times. It was my
first venture in writing for money…before that envelopes covered with poems,
character studies, and short stories filled boxes and the corners of closets. But
then the Times bought the article and asked for more.
Over the next years I wrote whenever I traveled--India,
China, Turkey, Peru, St. Lucia, Columbia, and so on. I wrote about my hospice patients. I did
ballet and music reviews. And many, many feature stories for the paper. I wrote
about Ballet Russe for Dance Magazine; about sailing the Med for Sailing
Magazine; about perfume for Tampa Bay Illustrated; America’s Cup helmsmen;
Greta VonSustren’s yacht; Tamara Mellon’s Jimmy Choo shoes, and Venus Williams’
design studio. Always learning from
truly wonderful editors, who molded and tightened my writing, each one became a
loving and caring professor and hopefully….my writing improved.
Now I have written my first book, a novel that takes place
off the coast of Trinidad, on the island of Chacachacare, a now abandoned leper
island where from the late 1920s over 300 patients, their uninfected
caregivers, and a convent of Dominican nursing sisters lived. Hansen’s disease
was effectively cured in the 1980s and the Chacachacare colony’s patients
dispersed back into society on medications that rendered their disease
non-infective. However, it was those
living there for nearly 60 years that caused me to reimagine their lives.
Today, one can walk through the abandoned buildings…the
convent, the church, the infirmary, and the tiny cottages of the patients. It’s
as though these people had gotten up and left "yesterday." Though the jungle is
now reclaiming many of the buildings, one can still pick up tubes of medicine, read
the name cards with the treatment someone received, see the rusting iron beds lined
up side by side. It was in the infirmary that I found scrawled on the wall in
tiny, childish script, the words, “When I grow up I want to be a teacher.” It
is to that child, and others like him, whose forlorn hopes were likely never
fulfilled, that I dedicate Land Without
Mirrors.
How
do you use your talents/time to help others?
Like most of us, I serve on a variety of committees: the FSU
Friends of Dance Board, chair of the Publicity Committee of the Big Bend
Orchestra, among them. I do pro-bono writing for several other worthy
organizations.
I hope I am a help to my three grown children with motherly
advice and understanding.
I bake Christmas cookies for the homeless…
And hopefully, next year I will publish a book of Hospice
stories that lets Death enter with beauty and not with fear.
