In the fourth grade, when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I responded that I wanted to be a hermit and live in the Maine woods. When informed by my teacher that “hermit” was not an occupation, I said I also planned to be an author. My mother was an English major and a school librarian, and I was raised with a love of books and a reverence for words.

My work has appeared in Down East magazine and has won first place in the Norway Library’s Celebration of the Short Story contest. I am a member of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and in 2014 was a finalist for the Maine Literary Award for Short Works Nonfiction for a submission of several essays, including “Buck’s Ledge.”

Although I was born in New Jersey and grew up in Connecticut, I have never belonged anywhere but in Maine. Both of my parents were displaced Maine natives, and I have spent every summer of my life at “camp”—a ramshackle cabin on a small lake in the western Maine foothills.

I was born eight and a half months after the sudden death of my father, into a family that was in the midst of a terrible grief, as well as a struggle to redefine itself as a family unit. This was a fact that largely escaped my notice until I became an adult. I am currently at work on Just Like Glass, a fictionalized memoir told in two voices—my own and that of my mother—about the year of my birth.

My husband and I have four adult children. We continue to live at camp during the summer, and spend the remainder of the year just three miles away, in the town of Greenwood.