About…
My first kiss was in the reference section of a Carnegie Public Library in rural Indiana. I strongly suspect there was magic afoot. My partner in crime eventually moved away, but my enthusiasm for spending time in the stacks continued to grow. Kissing boys was one thing, falling in love with books was an obsession. Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, Edith Wharton, The Brothers Grimm, Ursula K. Le Guin…all excellent companions, those deft spinners of story.
When I didn’t have my nose in a book, I was making music—seated at a piano singing jazz standards, or playing Strauss and Mozart on the French Horn. My university years were spent studying music history and theory, and although the path from musicologist to novelist may seem a strange one, it’s made perfect sense to me.