Although I was born in Minneapolis and live there now, I grew up near the Gulf Coast in southeast Texas and in rural central Minnesota. Summers during my high school years I worked on a dairy farm and after graduation I worked on a tie gang for the Northern Pacific Railroad. I had three brothers and our family loved to travel. We also loved taking the canoe up north and camping out. That zest for the wilds has never left me, and the farther north, the better.

Academics always suited me fine. I went off to college and discovered many new modes of adventure—literary, cultural, psychological, geographical, philosophical. Then it was graduate school. I was writing all the time, and still I hadn't discovered the writing life. I kept journals, wrote long letters when I could find someone to write a few lines back, experimented with poetry and short stories. I quit grad school and took up carpentry, then went to law school. Finally somewhere along the line I got married and had a daughter, and lordy I was bound to write for her.

When my daughter Alberta was ten years old, I began creating a one-page newsletter called The Lunchtime News that I put in her lunch once a week. It contained poems, graphics, articles about the exploits of a student scientist whose name was suspiciously similar to Alberta's, and art contests that were always won by—guess who. About a year later, after reading a book about a boy's wilderness adventure, I wondered why there were so few books about girls having such adventures. So I began writing a story about a young woman doctor on an emergency mission who crash-landed a light plane in the winter wilderness of northwestern Ontario and was forced to rescue herself. The story took up about twelve issues of The Lunchtime News. When it was finished, I realized I had the beginnings of a novel. After considerable research and countless rewrites, The Winter Road emerged.

I've made my living a number of different ways, but mainly by carpentering and lawyering, and sometimes I've done both at the same time. Each of them has an intellectual side and a practical side, and I like my writing that way too. I'm moving on now, can't stop here.

The Winter Road
Front Street, May 31, 2006
Ages 12 and up, ISBN 978-1-932425-45-1

“This survival story takes the classic girl-versus-nature plot to new extremes. ... So thorough is the realization of Willa's surroundings that readers may well feel they've gone through a whole survival course with her.” —The Horn Book

Set in northwestern Ontario, The Winter Road is a gritty survival story that pits a young woman against both arctic temperatures and her own selfdoubt. Seventeen-year-old Willa hates the knight's helmet she made in shop class. After brooding for a moment, she fetches a sledgehammer and smashes it. Since her older brother Ray died, her father ignores her and her mother is always busy. She needs to prove herself to them and to Ray. When her Uncle Jordy's drinking threatens to strand her mother in a remote native village, Willa jumps in his plane and flies the cold Canadian route alone. There's a storm and engine trouble.