Education

I attended elementary schools first in Salem, Decatur, and Lincoln, Illinois, and then in Columbus, Ohio. (I wasn't an army brat. We just moved a lot.) I graduated from Whitehall-Yearling High School in Columbus in 1970, and then attended college at the Ohio State University branch in Newark, about thirty miles east of Columbus. After one year there, I married, and then attended Ohio State in Columbus for a quarter, and in 1974 Central Ohio Technical College back in Newark for another quarter.

I didn't return to college until 1989, when, living in Tucson, Arizona, I entered the University of Arizona as a journalism major. After the first semester, I changed my major to English, and in 1992—twenty-two years after I began my higher education —I finally earned my Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating magna cum laude.

In the fall of 1992, I entered the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, specializing in fiction. I took fiction workshops with Paule Marshall (Brown Girl, Brownstones; Soul Clap Hands and Sing) and Tom De Haven (It's Superman!, Freaks' Amour), and nonfiction workshops with the late Larry Levis (The Widening Spell of the Leaves, The Dollmaker's Ghost). Funded throughout by a graduate teaching assistanship, I received my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1995. Tom De Haven directed my thesis, Where This Lake Is, and in 1997 it became my first novel, published by White Pine Press of Fredonia, New York.