Travel Writer

Travel is a large part of my writing work life.  I often pack my bags and laptop to travel to small towns, big cities and every place in between to meet with school kids and teachers, librarians, aspiring writers, parents and booksellers.  Leaving behind the confines of my home office provides much-needed connection and opportunity to discuss the how’s and why’s of research, and writing. 

But travel is also my inspiration.  A chance to grow my work, or more importantly, to incubate ideas for new stories. 

Two forthcoming books, Of Walden Pond:  Henry David Thoreau and Frederic Tudor and the Pond Between, and my debut Young Adult novel, For Lamb, are the recipients of putting miles between me and my desk.  

Several summers ago, I made a visit to Montgomery, Alabama and the Legacy Museum and Memorial (or what some call the lynching museum) and I read name after name of the victims posted there.  But what most surprised me was the number of female victims of lynching.  Very rarely were these women accused of any crime.  They were simply the mothers, sisters, wives and daughters of black men who were the targets of mob violence.  

And that’s when I knew I had to not only bear witness to this period of history, but I needed to honor the lives of these women in story.  I discovered the name Lamb Whittle among a list of female victims, with no other identifying information. I had no idea of her age, where she lived, the circumstances surrounding her death, and so I imagined what her life was and could have been in For Lamb, the story of an interracial friendship between two 16-year old girls in the Jim Crow south when one choice ensnares both families in the grip of racial violence.

Visiting Concord’s Walden Pond in Massachusetts provided the backdrop for Of Walden Pond, the source of inspiration for the dueling visions of essayist Henry David Thoreau, and Boston’s Ice King, Frederic Tudor and the ways in which Walden Pond was a bounty for both.  

Henry David Thoreau once said, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”  

For me, that is much easier done when I get out from behind my desk,  meet people, see the world and find the stories within them.