About Barbara

Miss Lane, my third grade teacher in California, allowed me to write scripts that the rest of the kids acted out, which was great fun. So I started writing early, but I didn't really apply myself until after I married a young farmer when I was eighteen.

In a hard working farm community sitting in-front of a typewriter when there were weeds in the garden was not a badge of honor. But I must say that when my first novel, co-authored with Peggy Hanson Dopp, Tomorrow is a River was published, the Community was wonderfully supportive to me. It took years to get to that point. It followed a six year stint working on a weekly newspaper.

I met the co-author of my first novel, Peggy Hanson Dopp, while I was working on the newspaper.  She and her daughter ran a school for troubled children called Lambscroft. A deep friendship developed when I was assigned to write a story about the school.

Later Peggy asked me to help her write a story she had carried in her head for 40 years that culminated in the Great Peshtigo Fire. A fire that took place the same night as the famous Chicago fire . I used Peggy and Lambscroft as part of the prototype of our heroine, Caroline Quimby.

My second novel , Sons of Thunder, came about because I became fascinated with something I read in an old green book about the Duchess of Coventrey. This led to Ireland and their 1898 rebellion against the English; and the amazing-story of Father John the real life priest of a small Irish village who led a peasant army against the English armed only with pikes and scythes.

Linger Not At Chebar, which is set in Burma was the result of tales told to me by a doctor whose parents were missionaries in Burrna during World War II when the Japanese invaded. His mother had left the missionary compound to give birth to her third child. She could not get back to her husband or the compound. she was forced to flee with two toddlers and a new born baby over the Himalayas to escape to India.

It was a dramatic story of a woman's courage that I couldn't resist. And like all my novels it evolved into a love story.

As a teenager I liked reading romantic fiction; The Bronte's, Louis Bromfield, Daphne Du Maurier, Edna Ferber. As a young wife I tried to make up for not having a college education by reading classics, Dickens, Doestoesky, Flaubert, Hemingway, Faulkner. For a long time I was lost in the past. In recent years I have been led to contemporaries; Toni Morrison, Raymond Carver, Isabel Allende, Edna O'Brien, Mary Morrison. I also like Wisconsin authors Norbert Blei and Ellen Hunnicut.

I enjoy the sensibilities of a wide range of writers, each one a gift, a surprise.

I write in a little room about 8' by 8' in our old farmhouse. It used to be the nursery for my children when they were babies. There are the usual files, bookcases, computers, posters, calendars ... and one window. The window often furnishes scenes of surpassing beauty as I usually rise when it is still dark, and I witness the dawn.

My father was a hard rock miner and I attended nine different schools before I was in the fifth grade. Later my family moved back to Wisconsin, which was the home state of both of my parents, and my father raised sheep.

My husband and I lost our first son in an accident when he was eleven. The other three children, Kim, Marc and Ryan, are grown and on their own now, but still very much part of our lives. We also have two daugthers-in-law, Doreen and Fays, and are soon to add a son-in-law, Robert, to the family. And we have our four grandchildren to enjoy, Travis, Isaac, Nicole and Brooke.

I am a barefoot, gather-wild-flowers kind of woman. We have a woods behind our house, and we feed a number of outdoor cats. I write about the cats and their strange ways.