Born at the end of the Great Depression, to a country butcher/logger/preacher, I grew up in the woods and small towns of Western Washington. "Home" looked a lot like this crayon-on-muslin drawing my mother did before she was married. 

By avocation both my parents were musicians and artists and my mother wrote wonderful romance novellettes.  I still have a box of her works-- all typewritten, illustrated with magazine pictures and neatly bound in construction paper with attractive cover designs by Mother. 

But we lived far from the centers of culture, and my exposure to the arts was highly limited. Both the movies and dances were on our boxes' black list.  I'd never heard of an art gallery, and opportunities to enjoy good music outside of the hymns at church, were limited to one program of classical music on the New York Philharmonic radio concert every Sunday afternoon. Mother wouldn’t miss it, so neither did we.

I dabbled with a few musical instruments as a child, but music teachers were unheard-of in our home, and the flute was the one instrument I wanted most to learn.  But it was never available to me.  I enjoyed singing, however, and eventually discovered my low alto voice and the joys of harmonizing with whatever song I heard.

My mother read to my brother and me, and we knew she wrote stories herself, though none of them was for children.  She took us to the local library in our town and there we began what was to gradually become a lifetime love affair with books and reading. 

The summer I was ten years old, we lived with my maternal grandmother, awaiting our move to California.  I discovered Mother’s stash of hand-typed and bound stories and devoured them.  In true child-like fashion, I busied myself with trying to imitate Mother.  I wrote a stack of my own stories, printed by hand in little notebooks, but also illustrated with magazine pictures.  Fortunately those early, anemic experiments with words on paper got lost in our  many family moves.

In high school, when I took the usual battery of career aptitude tests, the words “Writer” and “Artist” never showed up on any list of suggested careers. Doctor! Travel Agent! Social Worker! Missionary! Bible Translator! Even Archeologist! Then on a whim, I began college to pursue a career in Home Economics.

I loved writing letters and school papers. Every now and again I played with an old urge to write another story. But I never even dreamt of publication. I set my sights on doing something “significant” with my life.  I read biographies of great people changing the world through scientific discoveries and acts of spiritual sacrifice. World changers and missionaries were my heroes. Where would writing ever fit into either of those categories? 

Before I could finish my college Home Ec plans, however, a special guy who lived around the corner sidetracked me.  After he joined the AirForce, we married and I encountered an immediate need to write Bible study materials for the junior high girls in my Sunday School class. New reasons to write in the context of Christian Education almost literally screamed at me during this stage of my life.

So, over the next 10 years, I studied writing in correspondence courses, library books, adult education classes, writer’s conferences.  I had the privilege of attending the very first Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference Center, less than an hour's drive from my home.  It has since become a highly prestigious conference, and I love being a part of it every year.  I went back again and again,met editors, practiced writing, joined a critique group, submitted my efforts to publishers.  Before I knew it, I was selling some of what I wrote—articles, poems, Bible studies, a book, then another and another. 

Next, I found myself teaching at conferences and workshops around the country.  God even took me to India once to help a friend teach aspiring writers.  Then there was a weekend conference on St. Martin. For awhile I wondered whether I was a writer who teaches, or a teacher who writes. 

Eventually I met, in my imagination, a cast of characters from the Dutch history I read after our stay in the Netherlands.  And I became a novelist! See the story

At this point those wonderful studies my Theology teacher had introduced me to back in Bible college, mixed with a renewed interest in the Arts and became my next book project.  Dedicated to helping people find God in a  deeper way through meditations on the names and attributes of God, Lord, Show Me Your Glory  finally saw the light of day. Its reception and testimony as a changer of lives and hearts has made it clearly my most rewarding project yet.

At the beginning of the new millennium, all out of the blue, God gave me a friend with totally different ideas of God and very little religious spiritual agenda.  These days, my most challenging and exciting writing projects are those wonderful lengthy daily dialogues that fly back and forth between my Jewish friend, Ellen, and me. Sometimes funny, occasionally heated, they are always absorbing. With complete candor and a mutual dedication to getting to the bottom of each issue, we examine our own and each other's boxes and pillars.  We look at the nature of good and evil and how God fits into the picture...we talk about controversial movies and try to clear away cobwebs from long-standing debates... we challenge each other's assumptions, have epiphanies, and look for ways to stimulate others to the kind of dialogue we enjoy.    On and on the conversations go~we call them Conversations From the Rim of the Box.  Check out the Dialogue page, and you can join our fun.

Now, back in the 1940’s and 50’s, it never occurred to me that I could write a book or teach a group of would-be writers and change the world.  Today, I know that wherever God puts me to work, whatever He gives me to do can change at least bits and pieces of the world I touch.  And for me, that means writing, speaking, teaching, loving the arts and the people God sends my way.