I was born in Auburn, Maine, and grew up in its twin city Lewiston, which lay just across the Androscoggin River. It was a French world. My father, like most of the people in our town, came down to the States in his late teens from a farm in Quebec, eager to find work in the industrial cities of the U.S.

America was an idea that came to me through the big wooden floor length radio in our family room. My two brothers and I quickly took to this fantasy anxious to escape the confines of a French Catholic old world provincialism. A number of crucial events happened in my childhood that formed my character. The most important of which is the death of my mother when I was a year and a half. She died of TB. My family broke up and I was sent to live in a Catholic convent/boarding school when I was six years old after it was discovered that my father also had TB. I remained in that institution until the age of 14 when I began to feel that I would suffocate and die if I didn't leave, so I ran away. There followed a couple of years boarding with one Tante then another until I convinced my father to reunite our family. It was a necessary but bittersweet experience that I left in order to marry when I turned 17.

I had been a very smart girl, first or second in my class at the convent, but in the public schools of Lewiston I quickly lost interest with their efforts at teaching and I left after a half year of high school. My boyfriend and soon to be husband worked in a shoe factory and so did my father. Brother Bob turned down a scholarship offer to go to college because he felt he had a good job at the A & P. It was not a world that encouraged aspiration and ambition, and although I had a great sense of adventure, I could see no openings for me. My father sensing this boldness was relieved when I chose to marry, hoping I had found my place at last.

The ugly fact of earning a living descended on me like an anvil falling from a fifth story window. It had been a lark before marriage skipping along from one job to another, quitting at the slightest whim. Now, I had to take care of myself, and my husband too. A year after I was married I had my daughter so there were three of us and nothing was going to fall from the heavens. In desperation, I took whatever I could get, jobs in cotton mills, woolen mills, shoe factories, gutting chickens, working 2nd and 3rd shift. What happened to the adventurous girl? I did what I had done since early childhood to escape an inhospitable world. I read, and I was no slouch either, no modern romance or detective stuff. I wanted to know about what was going on in the world. Who was I and what did other people have to say about the experience of life? The historians, the great thinkers, literature, philosophy, science, were the books that interested me.

After some years, we were able to buy a house in the country where I made a good home for my family and enjoyed gardening, sewing, cooking. My life was easier and I decided to go back to school and entered college to maybe find something I liked doing. It was a step in a direction away from our life in the country. The marriage did not weather it and we were divorced. During my last year in college it occurred to me that I might be a writer, but I was not ready to act on that discovery and after graduation with a degree in psychology, I got a job in a mental health center working on the emergency team seeing people in crisis. It was fascinating work and there was an immediate bond between patients and I. If they were crazy then I must be too. What indeed was "reality"? And who's reality deserved more respect? My awareness was too keen to be trapped in the "mental illness" model of what I was seeing and hearing. This work was a turning point in my life and it changed my perceptions completely.

I could not abide the soul crushing mediocrity of bureaucratic servitude so I went to work at the shipyard, crossed a gangplank fording the Kennebec River and set to work renovating and retrofitting the U.S.S. Conyngham. What a beauty! Brutal, backbreaking (actually two fingers broken, arthritic left shoulder) dangerous work, but something I'm proud to have accomplished. My specialty was the heights, or rather trying to conquer the heights. Way up the main mast I would climb, shaking in my boots trying to get a job done. On my last day at the yard (I left when the ship was completed), I found the handsomest sailor on my ship and locked lips in a passionate embrace with him, threw my hard hat in the Kennebec River and went on my way.

Now that the ship was completed it was time to write. And so I started a bit at a time. First came poetry and then later stories. Along with the writing came dreams of bears. Not ordinary dreams, I knew about dreams and their symbolic language having kept a record of them for the last 6 years. These bear dreams did not conform to them. The bear was not a symbol, it was a real bear, wild, out of control and damn scary. Something powerful was happening. This psychic connection has remained constant in my writing in spite of much academic training. I nurtured it by going on a vision quest in the woods where I fasted for 4 days and was rewarded with a vision that supported my plan and informed me that my writing was to be a map, a guide for others, with a proviso. It had to be beautiful.

I moved to the village of Weld, a sleepy community with a population of 400 mostly retired people and plentiful moose and deer on the roads and in the fields. For two years, I lived a solitary life in a small cabin close by the woods without friends or acquainances in a state of peace and harmony while I wrote my first novel, COMICS (based on my experiences in the mental health center.) Also at the time, I undertook training with the shaman, Michael Harner, then with the witch Zsuzsanna Budapest and the very wise and powerful Starhawk.

When the money ran out, I worked in a hospital as a psychiatric social worker once more, mostly on call at night seeing people in crisis. Later, I was glad to accept an invitation from the University of Maine in Orono to become Artist in Residence. It was at UMO that my novel COMICS was adapted for the stage and performed to outstanding success. My next break came when I was accepted at Sarah Lawrence College in New York for the MFA program in creative writing.

I now reside in Manhattan where I have a practice as seeress counseling people, offering workshops. I also tell stories which I will regale you with. And I've written a group of poems based on the cards of the Major Arcana in the deck of Tarot, also narrative poems, essays, book reviews, etc.

I will tell you the story of my life as it unfolds day to day.