My love of story started with my parents. If Dad brought home a coconut, he didn't buy it at Safeway; no, he paddled to Hawaii, climbed a coconut tree, grabbed the fruit, shimmied down the trunk, (all the while fighting off bandits), finally riding a tortoise back across the ocean. Fun? Yes, but my dad's propensity for storytelling should have come with the warning that sometimes you need/want the facts and it can be frustrating when they're hidden from you. And yet, his fiction made me realize the truth in the lies fiction authors tell. He was declaring his love and his willingness to traverse an ocean for me. I also grew up listening to my mom and her sisters share stories around the kitchen table. Tales of getting into trouble when they 'stored' the chickens in milk cans so they wouldn't have to round them up the next morning. This is the way they bonded, the way they created their identity within the family.All of these stories led to a love of reading, which led to a Masters in English from San Diego State University. I then taught in the 1980s amnesty program. For much of the last fifteen years I taught in a small rural community college at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I published The Second Crack in 2014 and am now working on another novel.