Facts…they lie unquestioned, uncombinedWisdom enough to leech us of our illIs daily spun, but there exists no loomTo weave it into fabric.(Edna St. Vincent Millay)

But there is a loom. I know. I sit at that loom almost every day and weave, or try to weave, the fabric. I’m a nonfiction writer – I believe, celebrate and honor the power of fact. But I am also a storyteller, and so I believe also – and equally – in the power of literature.

This sounds maybe more high falutin’ than it needs to. (But it was an excuse to start with a poem by Ms. Millay, the woman you have to love for writing: My candle burns at both ends/ It will not last the night/ But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends/ It gives a lovely light!)There. That’s a double dose of Edna, and I haven’t even started yet..What I mean about my writing is that I am fascinated by true stories – real people, real events. I love research, whether it’s becoming part of a world I write about, as in Dancing with Rose, or tooling around the Mojave tracking down and interviewing desert rats, as I did for Happy Bottom Riding Club or hunching over FBI documents in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., as I did for Clever Girl.It’s the excitement of the chase…the pursuit of the true story, the ins and outs, the details, the particulars. Discovering, uncovering is half the fun. In another life, I might have been a private eye or maybe (and I hope this doesn’t offend the gentle reader), a medical examiner. Yes, that’s right, the one who roots around in other people’s insides.And then comes the literary…the quest to tell this true story in the most involving, compelling way, with characters who live on the page, with scenes a reader can fall into, with dialog and action and point of view. With a voice. But without – I repeat – without sacrificing the factual.When I was a kid, sitting under the crabapple tree on the front lawn reading My Friend Flicka, I dreamed of being a writer. I wanted to be able to make others feel the way certain writers made me feel: suspended in time and place, part of a world not my own. Later, I dreamed of a glamorous life in journalism. I was then under the powerful influence of the comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter (flaming red hair, exotic boyfriend with patch over eye, intoxicating international adventures) and the Susan St. James character in the TV series The Name of the Game (perky, witty, winsome, works for handsome powerful boss at great magazine). Journalism sounded great.Four years writing inverted pyramid news stories at Medill School of Journalism with grizzled Chicago Tribune editors-turned-teachers pointing out all my flaws plus eight or nine painful months covering zoning commission meetings in a northern California town brought me to my senses. It took me close to ten years to unlearn what I had learned about what makes a story and how to write it.And I’m still learning. I’m here at my desk, at my “loom” (okay, so it’s a Dell laptop), in my room that faces out to a small weedy meadow, and I’m weaving. Some days the fabric is rich and colorful, soft to the touch but sturdy as hell. Other days it’s thin and scratchy and the color of old running socks. But I persevere. On the days that I’m satisfied, I take a breath and smile. And then I raise the bar a little higher.