The Author

I started my first book when I was nine. It was about a ten year old girl who lived on a Colorado dude ranch. She was called Bunny, and her adventures consisted of capturing and taming wild horses--stallions, for choice. She had a herd of thirty before I began to feel that things had gone far enough. This goes to prove that literary judgment is acquired, not innate.

I always thought of myself as a writer after that, though I didn't try another novel for a long time. I wrote "poems" and short stories when I should have been doing my homework. This didn't do my grades much good, but my last year in high school I did get an Honorable Mention in the Atlantic Monthly High School Writing Contest. I found out about it the same day I saw my father get his doctor's degree; a great day for both of us.

In 1967, my brother was killed in Viet Nam. My poetry, never really worthy of the name, became dedicated to my grief. Finally, I stopped writing it. I have rarely used any kind of raw biographical material in my work since. I need distance.

In the decade after college, I moved to California, worked full time and went to graduate school so that I would have some interesting way of making a living while I wrote, but did not do much actual writing. Between work, school, marriage, motherhood and baking my own bread, I just couldn't seem to squeeze it in; I think I managed three short stories in ten years, and one children's book (about 135 pages), which got some lovely regretful rejection letters until I gave up on mailing it out.

I found more time to write, though not as much as I wanted, had my first big publication (i.e., not a college magazine, etc.) in 1981 in Seventeen, a story called "The Windows of the Soul" which was reprinted the next year in Album, Scott Foresman's high school English textbook. It wasn't the breakthrough I had hoped.

With my attention on making a living and that chimera of real-life romance, there was still not as much time to concentrate on the writing as I felt I needed. I inherited some money and used it to take a couple of months off, during which I wrote a mystery novel, but when I went back to work I stuck it in a drawer and never marketed it after one attempt to get an agent. You might say I was discouraged.

Another decade passed.

I looked for a writing class as a means of getting to know people, and found Phil Slater's playwriting seminar. I had never written a play, but plunged in anyway, and after much fumbling, finally came up with a series of one-act comedies, "The Friends of Tootie MacArthur," which was given a staged reading at the Actors' Theatre in Santa Cruz in October 94. Another comedy, "Ask Your Angel,", written in December 94, was read in June of 95, and a third is in process even as I write this.

On a visit in January 95 to Palm Desert I saw a brochure for a "falconry experience". A month later, when I was pondering the character of the hero for the love story I had suddenly decided to write, I remembered the rush of pleasure I had felt when I saw the falcon flying right toward me, passing directly over my head; how it had made me laugh.

I wrote The Falconer in less than three weeks, including the week of planning before I starting the actual writing.

I look back on all those frustrating years when I couldn't devote my full attention to writing, and I'm surprised at how much I've done. Another couple of short story publications ("Advice to the Lovelorn," in First, for Woman in April, 1994 and "The Other Shoe" in Innisfree, Winter 1994), a couple of dozen unpublished stories, a number of false novel starts, a science fiction novella, three screenplays, two plays, and now The Falconer.