Your cocktail-party description of Midstream: It’s the summer of ’74, Chicago. Polly Wainwright thinks she’s finally landed on a safe perch in a turbulent world – anti-war protests, noisy feminists, the old ways fraying when she finds that every decision she’s made is based on a lie.
When you realized you wanted to be an author: In my first career, I was a fine art photographer. While I continue to love photographs, I wanted to go below the surface of events. I wanted to explore what’s inside characters and relationships. For this, nothing beats fiction.
Your first published work: When I was a professor at Columbia, I contributed essays and art reviews to Afterimage, Art Week and Exposure. At the same time, around 1990, I began to write stories. My first was published in Roanoke Review, a small literary journal connected to Roanoke College. Since then my stories have appeared in many fine journals and included in NPR’s Selected Shorts. My story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough appeared in 2018.
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