Biography
I grew up in the Midwest and in California, with excursions around the rest of the US and, from time to time, Europe– my parents enjoyed travel and my father had made friends in Czechoslovakia when he was stationed there at the end of World War II.
I've always invented stories—first in the course of drawing, and then in words. It's possible that this storytelling impulse is genetic—my Grandpa Huebner told lots of exciting lies, and many of my cousins are good storytellers—or it may be that I just needed to be like Harriet the Spy and for that matter follow in the footsteps of Marguerite Henry (who kindly autographed a pile of books for me) and C.S. Lewis (who died before I could read the Narnia books). So, after receiving a degree in Theatre Arts from the University of California at Santa Cruz, I plunged into life as a fiction writer, living on a boat and working in factories, offices, oil refineries, theaters, publishing, private investigation, and adolescent drug rehab, because it was obvious to me that this was the best path to being a good writer.
Over the years, my short fiction has appeared in such literary and genre venues as Northwest Review, Colorado State Review, Magic Realism, Fantasy Macabre, Ceilidh, Weave, Opossum, and Unlikely Stories. Eventually I began working on novels, but meanwhile I earned an MA at American University and PhD at University of Pittsburgh, both in Art History, which resulted in my first published book, Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic.