Why I Started Writing:

There was no true conscious decision to write. I just did it because I loved story. And I started early. At nine. Writing stories for my mom on 3x5 index cards, stapling the cards together and providing a front and back cover with art and author’s bio. Writing was as natural and necessary to me as breathing. It still is. If, for whatever reason, it gets blocked, I wither on the vine.

Authors Who Have Influenced Me:

Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Chaim Potok, Madeleine L’Engle, Patricia McKillip, Harper Lee, Rudy Wiebe, Leo Tolstoy, Nikos Kazantzakis, James Joyce, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jennifer Johnston, Gail Tsukiyama, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fleming, Patrick O’Brian, the Greek plays, the Greek and Roman mythologies, the Bible in Elizabethan English, to name a very few. Poets have also been incredibly influential in terms of lyricism, simile, metaphor and the general flow of my writing: Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Dylan Thomas, Tennyson, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Keats, Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Jane Kenyon, a short list.

Books I Have Written:

This is a short list of what I consider my major fiction works: The Wings of Morning, The Face of Heaven, Whispers of a New Dawn, Ashton Park, Under a Dover Sky, London Dawn, An Amish Family Christmas [Harvest House]; My Heart Belongs in Gettysburg [Barbour]; A Bride’s Flight, A Road Called Love, The Rose of Lancaster County [HarperCollins/Harlequin]; Mizzly Fitch [Regent College Publishing]; All My Beautiful Tomorrows, Grace Rider, Ride the Sky, The Zoya Septet—Zo, The White Birds of Morning, Beautiful Skin, A Sun Drenched Elsewhere, Petals [MillerWords].

What I'm Working On Now:

I am co-writing a series called ISLANDS about three Mennonite men during the Pacific War (1941-45); I am working on the next novel in my Zoya Septet; I’ve begun a work about a church and its people set in Berlin 1929 -1939 (Die Kirche).