Novels

The best of my childhood was the summers and holidays I spent on my grandparents' Iowa farm—80 acres with horses, cows, chickens, pigs, barn cats and a farm dog—all within the framework of traditional rural neighborliness. This led to my later passion for the community lifestyle, especially in gardening communities, and my fascination with rural Iowa in the early twentieth century.

Part II, "Thrashing" During threshing season when neighbors work together to thresh oats, Etta's understanding of herself, her family, and her hopes for the future are changed through a close-up look at a large family tyrannized by a man who was himself the son of a tyrant.

Part III, "Friend or Foe" Etta Oakes wonders about the German Catholic family buying the farm that her best friend's family lost through foreclosure. In the 1920s after The Great War, isolationism and xenophobia were strong, especially in depressed rural areas.

Selects Her Own (Young Adult / Adult) Published May, 2006
Two young women and an adolescent boy must deal with the deadly hostility directed at homosexuals. Interwoven with this special challenge is one all lovers face, the struggle to mesh individual needs and dreams to create a joyful and fulfilling life for both.

Moons and Junes (Young Adult) Published Jan, 2006
Thirteen-year-old Megan tricks her conservative parents into letting her spend three weeks on a rural commune with a classmate, Athena, while her parents go to Hawaii for a second honeymoon. Nothing turns out the way she plans, and what was supposed to be a simple vacation throws her off her foundations.

Arika Gets It (Young Adult)
With professional parents, Arika has never lacked material comfort. But at age sixteen, she makes two important discoveries about what she has been missing: black culture and her real father.

Child of the Wild Wind (Young Adult) Published Aug, 2003
After his parents divorce, Joshua Weil lives with his father in a rural commune , trying to work out his friendships with girls and become a man while caught up in the whirl of an unconventional lifestyle around him.

Daddy Come Lately (Young Adult / Adult) Published Sept, 2006
Dan Starke's life took a quick slide to hell when Arika Blake turned down his marriage proposal and in rebound he got Camille pregnant. Now he must either emigrate to Canada to marry a girl he doesn't even like, or lose contact with the baby daughter who needs him.

Grinder(Young Adult)
Heddi Rook's life is torn apart when both parents are called up with the National Reserves and sent to Iraq. They leave her in the care of her middle-aged, unmarried aunt, who is overwhelmed with the responsibility of playing parent to a teenager.

Wake Up in the Morning Bright is set on my grandparents' farm in the 1920s, the time period of my mother's childhood. A few anecdotes within it really happened, but most of the action and characters are invented.

After creating a fictional rural commune in Iowa named Wild Wind Community as a setting, I connected my six young adult novels and my three adult plays by picking up minor characters in one work and featuring them in another. Several of the novels overlap each other in time so that events can be seen from more than one perspective.

Thus, Megan narrates Moons and Junes, then her friend's older sister Barbara becomes a narrator in Selects Her Own. Barbara connects with characters I created over twenty years ago in one of my plays -
Long Night's Journey, bringing their lives up to date.

Megan's Wild Wind friends Athena and Mockingbird are also in Arika's story, Arika Gets It. Mockingbird narrates his own story in Child of the Wild Wind, with Arika as a minor character. His older friend Cheetah has the title role in Daddy Come Lately. Athena narrates Grinder as an observer, with Heddi Rook as the main character.