Try growing up in the early post-World War II culture of Middle Tennessee, then add early adulthood in a rapidly changing deep South college followed by several early marriage years lived between rural Tennessee and big city Chicago. After that, stir in several years of a U.S. Foreign Service career in the Middle East and Washington, D.C. Then add a move to a Pacific Northwest island community. How’s that for a life of change?

Well, if the one constant in your life is the compulsion to write fiction (mostly) to capture the ideas that keep bubbling up through all this, you do have plenty of material.

None of this has led to a particularly successful writing career. I’ve not written a best-seller or anything near it, despite abundant material.

I don’t think, though, that, even if I had tried, I would have been able not to write. Gardeners garden, teachers teach, writers write.

I am so grateful that no matter how successful I may or may not be, I had and have people in my life who cared and care about me and the world around us. It really is, of course, about the caring. If we are cared for and learn to care about the people in our lives, even extending that care to desperate people as we are given opportunity, then we are successful in what counts.