Mumford & Sons’ song “Wilder Mind” on their album by the same title says something about identity and the imagination – “you can be every little thing you want nobody to know.” My new project SALT DREAMS is also about wilder minds and even wilder hearts than in UNDERCURRENTS. The novel explores identity and desire.… Continue Reading
We are who we believe we are…
When I was a girl my father told me his grandmother was Cherokee, his father’s family French – “DuBois became DuBose somewhere along the line,” he said. My grandmother had distinct Native features as did one of my sisters. There was no reason to question it. I grew up playing outdoors like most children of… Continue Reading
Resistance by Degrees
When I was a girl, questioning everything my mother told me to do or not to do, she said it was a phase. It was not. We may try on different identities, remake ourselves again and again – Madonna or David Bowie style, but self-identification is not something we are likely to outgrow – as… Continue Reading
Flawed Characters
What makes a flawed character? Are they divergent? Are they so far outside the norm as to make them unbelievable? Or are they simply more human? Aren’t we all flawed characters on the stage of life – good and bad, happy and sad, fickle and steady? You get my drift. All of our ways of… Continue Reading
Mother/Daughter Relationships
In WHO CAN KNOW THE HEART I examine complex mother/daughter relationships, not precisely because I have unresolved issues (though I might have) but because I find the subject one that allows for an interesting exploration of one matrix of the human condition. My oldest sister, twenty years my senior, once told me that by the… Continue Reading
What’s love got to do with it?
In the most general sense, when I set out to write WHO CAN KNOW THE HEART, I wanted to say something about love. It did not amount to a premise. It was just a thought. Then I situated that thought into a time frame and within a specific dysfunctional American family. The St. James family… Continue Reading
Identity Formations, Part Two
In Who Can Know the Heart, Henry adopts an alternate identity that he wears like a suit of armor. Henry as Wizard acts like everything is illusion, the world obscured, everyone doubled, split. A consequence of the back-story: the reckless acquisition of mineral rights for the burgeoning steel industry, Wizard tells riddle-like prophetic tales from… Continue Reading
Curiosity and Identity
Curiosity that leads to looking for secrets lies at the crossroads of sameness and difference – desire to imagine we are all the same yet seduced by the possibility we are different. Imagining other ways of being offers the opportunity to disrupt the idea of us/them. What is outside is seldom the same as what… Continue Reading
Identity Matters
For twenty-five years I ran long distance, but until I left my university post, I never realized how much of that running had been about running away. My characters tend to run long distance as well, figuratively speaking at least, and they too learn that running away is not the same as being free. In… Continue Reading
Undercurrents 
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