Don't worry - these were the first and last matching outfits my mom and I had. My mom is a generous and talented educator who, every night of my childhood, read books to me and my brother that we got deliciously lost in.
I used to perch at the top of my favorite magnolia tree, hidden in the leaves, devouring books.
My brother came from Korea when I was four and he was two. We enjoyed dancing in rain puddles and building cities for our Smurf collection and catching lightning bugs in the alley.
My dad is a scientist who used to bring home jars of formaldehyde with bits of animals inside and microscope slides with pink slivers of tissue for us to "play with". He is a man of many talents - here we are refinishing a cedar chest.
I've been friends with Andrea and Amanda W. since middle school. Here we are at the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. My other good friends Amanda C. and Megan aren't in this picture, but we've been friends for a long time, too.
Epifania is a warm, wonderful Mazatec healer who has taught me a lot - including how to say 'damn chickens!' in Mazatec when we have to shoo chickens from the kitchen (shrandaa pendejo!). Here we are in her village near Huautla, Oaxaca, taking the kernels off corn cobs to make tortillas.
Here are my friends Fidelina (left) and her mother María Chiquita (right) in Huajolotitlan, Oaxaca. In this photo, the healer María Chiquita (María the Little One) was 96 years old and still curing with gusto. (No, I'm not a giant-- only 5'4" tall-- but María was very, very chiquita.) She passed away at age 97 and left beautiful memories.
My husband, Ian, and I met when I was seventeen and he was sixteen. For the next ten years he lived in the Colorado Rockies, while I bumbled around Europe and the Americas. We saw each other on vacations visiting our families in Maryland, and finally got hitched a few years ago.
I recently spent time with Gaby and María Belem in their Quichua village in the Andes while I was doing research for a book (okay, that was my excuse, but mostly I was having fun with very friendly people, eating strange and delicious fruit, and hearing pan flute melodies everywhere.)
I was born in 1973 in Baltimore City and spent the first ten years of my life there in old brick houses with alleys. When I was eleven, my family moved to a Baltimore suburb that used to be farmers' fields and woods. When I wasn't in school, I was exploring the woods and stream and discovering remnants of what used to be there - rusted fences, ancient farm tools, an abandoned barn. As a teenager, I loved to hang out with my friends by the Patapsco River, which ran through a nearby old mill town. Down a path through the trees, there was an enormous dam that we would sneak inside of. It felt like a cave in there. You could climb out an opening onto some rocks and stand behind the waterfall and get soaked in its spray.
I went to St. Mary's College in southern Maryland, near the Chesapeake Bay. There I lived in a house with secret passages called 'Poodle Doodle House'. (There used to be a poodle-grooming business in the basement). My favorite memories of that time are nights swimming in the bay with glow-in-the-dark phytoplankton and watching herons wade in the marsh and gathering seaglass on an isolated beach.
After I earned my B.A. in Anthropology and French, I decided I wanted to go somewhere faraway and exotic, so I got certified in teaching ESL (English as a Second Language) and sent job applications around the globe. A small university in a town in Oaxaca, Mexico was the first to offer me a job, and I snatched it up (although at the time I thought Mexico wasn't exotic enough - after all, I'd already been to Cancun. Little did I know....)
The town was Huajuapan, nestled in the mountainous Mixtec region of Oaxaca, and it turned out to be an enchanting place. During my two years there, people welcomed me into their lives and shared their culture and stories with me. Thanks to their patience, I became fluent in Spanish and learned some of the indigenous language Mixteco. I participated in Mixtec and Mazatec healing ceremonies and formed friendships with healers. Every day was so stimulating I carried my notebook everywhere and wrote voraciously, desperate to capture every detail, every bit of dialogue, every smell and sound.
A few years later, while I was working on my Masters in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Arizona, I drew on my journal writing from Oaxaca to begin writing my first novel, What the Moon Saw. That summer, for my fieldwork on Mixtec childbirth practices, I went back to Oaxaca and hung out with women and healers, and finished the first draft of the book.
Now I live with my husband, Ian, our son, and our long-short dog, Luli, in Fort Collins, Colorado. I spend my days writing and teaching English to adults from all over the world and college Cultural Anthropology. Whenever I scrape together extra money and a chunk of time - usually about once a year - I go back to Oaxaca to visit friends. Here in Colorado, I like walking by the Poudre River, hiking in the mountains, reading in my garden, hanging out with friends, and dancing salsa, cumbia, and merengue. I still carry my notebook almost everywhere I go.
