About the Book

Author Biography

Brooding with Storm Clouds was inspired by an extraordinary program that lured me from the New York suburbs to Oaxaca for three high school summers and led to my studies of anthropology, first at Bennington College, then at the University of California, Los Angeles, and finally the New School for Social Research for a master’s degree. But living in New York, I longed for a more rural, simpler, hands-on life, galvanized, in part, by the village visits of my Oaxacan experience. 

I soon found my place—a century-old, wood-heated summer inn on a hill overlooking Maine’s Penobscot River as it opens to the bay. Together with novelist and poet Bill Carpenter, we’ve kept this old house warm, turned food waste into compost, sailed among dozens of Maine islands, and sent a lovely child into the world. Throughout, I worked as a journalist for national and international periodicals, including cover stories in Smithsonian and Natural History magazines, served as a correspondent for the Boston Globe and other regional newspapers, founded COA, the magazine of College of the Atlantic, and published two Maine travel books and the oral history compilation We Never Knew Any Different: Stockton Springs Stories of the Past Century. 

Eventually, the quiet of rural Maine and the daily interplay of sun and cloud on water, offered me the perspective to visualize the fullness of the friendships and openings gathered during my time in Oaxaca and mold it into the fictional story that is Brooding with Storm Clouds.