ARTIST STATEMENT
There a place in the artist’s heart where all things are bearable, no matter how terrible, where experience is sifted through, consecrated, hallowed and transformed into something we call art.
Ever since I began writing some twenty years or so years ago, I have been fascinated by literary form, function and structure. I have written many short stories in which I have experimented with the architecture of words on the page and  I often find myself visualizing the story as one might imagine  a painting or even a sculpture.   I find metaphor is  such an ally in the craft of writing. In my debut novel "The Hard Seed",  I have attempted to construct a writerly shape  which would imitate the central theme of the novel - trauma.  I also enjoyed working with  the motif of the seed and the rose hip which is so beautifully illustrated  in the pages of the novel by visual artist Julie Andrews.
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Like many women writers before me, I  gather bits and pieces of life, the lint, leaves, rags and string of experience and dreams and use them to create stories which reflect a position in and experience of the world, which is often different than that of men. Likewise, in my writing of these stories, I have used, re-visioned and embroidered my own experience, enmeshed with observations from everyday life and insights from my reading. For me, in both writing and reading, what I look for above all else is an emotional rather than a historic truth because, as we all know, facts come and go. I have little regard for facts because fiction is not constructed from facts but is always a work of the creative imagination.