About KC

In the way back of time, my folks owned a mom-and-pop motel on a highway being slowly strangled by the new Interstate to Portland. I was distraught when my older sister Julia went off to school, but then she came home every day and taught me to read. And my lifelong love affair with books began in the apartment over the office of a small motel.

We visited my Mom’s family in Indiana some summers. Cousins and aunts and uncles galore. Some of us would sneak up the stairs to my Aunt Lucy’s attic in a farmhouse ancient even then. The place smelled of mothballs and cedar and that staleness that comes from disuse. It was perfect. The day I learned I would be a writer, a great whopper of a lightning storm rolled across the corn fields. Each flash through the high window made the shadowy objects in the corners come alive. And writing was then and is now what makes me feel alive.

I’ve never not written. In my job in finance telling stories with numbers, I’ve lugged one manuscript after another through airport after airport, hoping for a space in time to open up and a bit of inspiration could be willed to the surface, find a chance to breathe life into another character.

But there were kids to feed, and bills to pay… you know the story. There was life after that life.

Lots of education followed, both via official and hard knocks variety. Notably, working with Tom Jenks on the Art of the Story, and the Stanford Novel Certificate program, Josh Mohr, Steve Almond, Writing x Writers, and so many other brilliant conjurers.

My life now revolves around the beauty of the world that breaks my heart every single day. And I share this life with my husband and a mongrel masterpiece of a heeler, Miss MagPie and we glamp about in our little van called the PieMobile.

And I wait, always, for the dark corners and the lightning to flash just right.