Favorite Books

Links

Awards

A child with an overly-active imagination, I was grounded for half my young life. My various stunts involved, but were not limited to, cliffs, tall trees, construction sites, and a failed attempt to make “rocks” with all the chemicals in my dad’s workshop. Thinking back on these escapades makes me shudder now that I’m a mother—I would have grounded me too! My friends, Kyle and Grace, and I continued to embark on expeditions into the mini-wilderness that surrounded our ’70s-era homes in Olympia, Washington; stage dramas on the front lawn; and watch rainy-day marathons of Creature Features, Tarzan movies, Star Trek, Twilight Zone, or Outer Limits. I had piano and ballet lessons, but otherwise, life was relatively unscheduled. For the most part, we were free to terrorize the neighborhood until our parents shouted for us to come home for dinner.

Nights were made for reading, and read I did, sometimes until dawn, turning out the light when my parents came upstairs to bed, flicking it back on when I heard my dad’s thunderous snores. I just had to finish A Wrinkle in Time, The Secret Garden, Jessamy, The Hobbit, Julie of the Wolves, Watership Down, All Creatures Great and Small, or the latest novel by Joan Aiken or Judy Blume, books that enthralled and inspired me to write poems, stories, and school newspaper articles myself; shameless, I’d try anything.

I’m still a voracious reader. Over the years, favorites have included the work of Edna O’Brien, William Trevor, Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, Tim Winton’s The Riders, E. Annie Proulx’s Shipping News, Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea, James Joyce's Dubliners and The Dead, Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and anything by William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, W. Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, Henry James, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters. (See "Favorite Books," above, for a longer list.)

But why set Snow in July in Butte, you ask? For most local kids, summer vacation meant traveling to Disneyland or Lake Chelan. For us, it meant Butte, Montana, my dad’s hometown. While this destination inspired sympathy (what a drag) or derision (you’re going to Butt, Montana, ha-ha-ha), I enjoyed our trips. Perhaps any place visited regularly in childhood takes on a mythic quality in one’s consciousness. Butte is definitely a place where myth and reality collide. It’s also where I was exposed to the art of storytelling. My Doran relatives, Irish to the core, sat around for hours telling tales of the past with me listening attentively.

It took years for me to find my own voice. During that long process, I majored in English at the University of Washington. When I graduated, reality set in: I needed a job. So I detoured into editorial positions at newspapers and magazines, editing, writing reviews and feature articles.

After I married and started a family, I freelanced for national and local periodicals and worked on a guidebook or two, but talking on the phone became increasingly difficult in a household with three small children. (I seriously considered having a sound-proof phone booth installed at one point!) Nor was I as creatively fulfilled as I would have liked. So, despite intense sleep deprivation, I decided to pursue my dream of writing fiction. Dream on, more like it. But I was determined.

In time, I published short stories and won fellowships (see “awards,” above). I signed with agents, Mary Alice Kier and Anna Cottle, who tirelessly submitted my novels (there were two before Snow in July), which sparked interest, though not enough for the elusive big break--until Laura Hruska at Soho read Snow in July and said the magic word: Yes.

Writing, for me, has been and will be a life-long apprenticeship. No scrap of paper is safe—cocktail napkins, dry cleaning receipts, sports release forms (the latter caused my daughter to wail, “Mom, don’t write dialogue on that; I need it for soccer!”)  It’s a way to make sense of the world, to connect with what makes us most human. My goal is a deceptively simple one: to write a good story, one that will keep you turning the pages long into the night, laughing, crying, and wondering what happens next.