About

This blog is a writer’s journal, comments on the process of writing a memoir.  

I began Off Track: Confessions of a Feminist Christian in 1999 but got side-tracked by life, too busy living to achieve a consistent writing practice.

Over the years, I took many classes in creative nonfiction writing and in memoir, ending with a year-long seminar led by Barbara Abercrombie for only eight students.  Because it began in September of 2020, our weekly meetings had to be conducted via Zoom.  Now the eight of us continue to meet weekly online as a writing group, providing feedback and support to each other.

I’d produced three other books before deciding to write a memoir:

• A dissertation titled Women in the Katherine group and Ancrene Riwle (1979), unpublished but available from the University of California at Berkeley.
• A prochoice book called Abortion–My Choice, God’s Grace: Christian Women Tell Their Stories (Pasadena CA: Hope Publishing House, 1994).  For Parts 1 and 2, I gathered and edited stories of women who had had an abortion or witnessed poignant moments of choice in other women’s lives.  I wrote the introduction, my own story of choice, and Part 3 “The Bible and Choice.”
• An autobiography for my mother titled Adventures of a Telluride Native (Boulder CO: Johnson Printing, 1999).  She wrote chapters, I edited them, and I ghost-wrote sections about the lives of my grandparents and my father.

In 1999 I resigned from a tenured teaching position at a Catholic college for women in Los Angeles and started work on my memoir.  Then in 2007 I started teaching Women & Religion at California State University, Northridge.

Now I’m doing the final editing and revision–and seeking an agent and publisher.

Why “Mountains and Memoir”?  Because when I’m not writing, I’m likely to be climbing a mountain.  There’s a lot of uphill climbing in both writing and hiking, but along the way there are also many new vistas and discoveries.  

The bear went over the mountain… to see what she could see.