As readers can probably tell from my books, I love the outdoors.

I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.

So much depends upon a blue car splattered with mud speeding down the road.

I prayed to trees. This was easier than praying directly to God. There was nearly always a tree nearby.

Life is like a bowl of spaghetti. Every once in a while, you get a meatball.

I once fell 20 feet from a tree, was knocked unconscious, and when I picked myself up and straggled home, my parents thought I was making it up. However, when my brother and I fabricated a story about an encounter with a bear, they believed that! So maybe I learned very early on that fiction was more interesting to listeners!

I am drawn to the ways in which we are shaped by people and by place.