I'm an old Hoosier, born on Oct. 19, 1947, in Fort Wayne, IN—a good place, as a friend once said, to be from. Indeed, I was so eager to be From Fort Wayne that I joined the Army in my youth, when I was a nursing student in a Catholic hospital school. I was anti-war, a coffee-house singer of protest songs, so the move was incongruous, perhaps even idiotic. But I loved irony, and I was really naive; I believed the recruiting sergeant, who told me there was a "waiting list a mile long" for nurses who actually wanted to go to Viet Nam. No, I would spend my two-year hitch far from harm, lying in the Hawaiian surf or riding the Arizona desert on a horse with no name.

My first book—my only published book, as of October 2001—is a fiction riff on the year-and-a-month I spent as a combat operating room nurse in Viet Nam. It's titled "Don't Mean Nothing." Before I wrote the book, I married, spent time in the Peace Corps (1973-74, Venezuela), got my Journalism BA (1984, University of Maine at Orono), gave birth to and pretty much raised three kids, and worked in a variety of jobs—including nurse, waitress, lounge singer, envelope-stuffer, storyteller, reporter/photographer and columnist, and nursing lab teacher. I've lived in South America, Maine, spent a brief sojourn in Chicago, lived 24 years in Eastern Massachusetts—where I fell in love with the Red Sox--and currently reside in Brooklyn, where I must keep my love under wraps. I spend my days writing, bicycling, traveling, co-editing a lovely little magazine (Vestal Review), making beaded jewelry, taking long walks and pushing my pacifist agenda.

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