Me!
I was born in the small coastal town of Milford, Connecticut to a kindergarten teacher and a drama professor. Unfortunately, they couldn’t raise me for long, so I was shuttled back and forth between relatives until I landed with a bump on the doorstep of a grandmother so eccentric and larger-than-life, I’m pretty sure she was created by Mr. Dickens. She was called “Mard,” and she had many opinions, all of them correct. I should also add that she loved me, something I took for granted at the time, but which, it turns out, makes a lot of difference.
I went to Garden City High School on Long Island where I read novels and was a lazy student. Creative Writing was the only class I ever failed. After that, I went to Sarah Lawrence College, where I studied drama—but since I was so introverted that I didn’t much like being looked at, and so dreamy that I was never “in the moment,” but in some much better, invented moment of my own, I was a pretty bad actress. I moved my focus to creative writing (in spite of High School) and was marginally better at it.
Mard
I married a Canadian and moved to Toronto, Canada, and I’m still there. The rest of the story is pretty boring because it mostly consists of me staring at my computer and frowning for years and years until I develop a big wrinkle on the left side of my brow and eventually finish my forthcoming novel, Witchlanders. Please buy it because if my publisher doesn’t ask me to write a sequel, I won’t’ be able to develop a wrinkle on the right side, and I’ll be asymmetrical forever.
5 Things People Might Not Know About Me
1) I like to eat alone in restaurants. Why don’t other people like to do that? It’s fabulous!
2) When I was little, I wanted to be either a trapeze artist or a jewel thief. (Because my favorite movie was To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant.)
3) My favorite movie now is probably Blade Runner, Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz. I know, everybody says those, but I can’t help it. Oh, or maybe Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Love that one too.
3) If I hadn’t become a writer I think I would have been a good archeologist or paleontologist, or maybe a computer programmer. I think that programming and writing a novel are more similar than people think–writing a novel involves a lot of thorny problem solving.
5) I don’t write alone! I would not have been published without my fabulous writing group: Kathy Stinson, Hadley Dyer and Paula Wing. (No, we don’t have a cute name for ourselves. I’ve tried to suggest them, but they always roll their eyes at me.)
