About

I was born a very long time ago and grew up in Temple City, California, before there were such things as shopping malls, super markets, McDonald's, or self-serve gas stations.

I was twelve years old before I saw with my own eyes the miracle of television. In high school, I wrote with a fountain pen because ballpoint pens had not yet been invented. Can you imagine? These days, when I visit schools and talk with students, I’m often asked if I always knew I wanted to be a writer. The truth is, I wanted to be a cowboy, or a detective, like Nancy Drew…or maybe I’d join the Army and be a WAC.

I longed for the adventures of riding the range, or catching a thief, or winning a war. Really, my young life in our quiet suburban town was so dull that I used to pray for an earthquake. Luckily, the recipient of my prayers was wiser than I, and the foundations of Temple City remained calm and secure.

Lacking real life excitement, my adventures came through books. Stories about dogs, ocean voyages, struggling orphan children and, of course, Nancy Drew and her mystery solving chums, all provided me with a magical window, through which I could see a vast variety of worlds beyond the limits of my everyday life.  It is this gift that comes from reading a book that I seek to share with my readers. 

When speaking with groups I am often asked, "Why don't you ever write about happy things?” Strange as it may sound, given the subjects of my books, I believe I do write about happy things. I write about people who are faced with very difficult

situations, and who somehow manage to cope and get on with life. To me, that is the reality of happiness--that we can find our way through hard times without being destroyed by them, and we can emerge stronger and wiser on the other end.

For decades my writing mostly consisted of weekly shopping lists, comments on student papers, and yellow Post-its stuck to the refrigerator door.

It was not until my second daughter left home that I found a quiet

space for my typewriter. Then I began to consider writing for a broader audience than the local grocer. In 1981 I took a class in creative writing at a nearby college. As I worked on an assignment calling for a childhood remembrance, scenes from my life when I was six, in1942, came to me as fast as I could write them down. The remembrances dealt with my affections for a Japanese family, and with my feelings surrounding their internment in a relocation camp.

When that essay, “Down in Infamy,” was published in the Los Angeles Times, I was surprised and touched to receive many letters telling me how much my writing had meant to individual readers. No shopping list or Post-it note had ever offered such a satisfying experience. I was hooked.

While teaching at an alternative high school in southern California, I wanted to help my students gain the breadth and freedom that had come my way through a reading habit, and I was always on the lookout for books that they would find meaningful and entertaining.

Because I had trouble finding enough books my students could relate to, books that offered a realistic portrayal of life as they knew it, I decided to try writing a book for teens. I chose to write about a twelve year old girl who was being molested by a neighbor.

Statistics indicate that one out of three girls and one out of six boys will have an unwanted sexual experience with an adult before they reach the age of eighteen. Sexual molestation seemed an important subject for teen fiction.

As I wrote Telling, I brought each chapter of the evolving manuscript into my classroom and kept the pages in a big, green, three-holed notebook. Students delighted in pointing out errors in spelling or punctuation. Sometimes a student would tell me, “This part is stupid,” or “I don’t think Cassie would act like this.” Often I rewrote a section, or changed the dialogue, based on students’ insights.

Though I might have given up after the eighth or ninth rejection of my manuscript by a potential publisher, I kept seeing student after student, some who had never before read a book, come into my classroom, get the big green notebook from the shelf, and remain engrossed in the story all period long. This gave me the courage to keep sending the manuscript out until I finally found a publisher who would publish my book.

Since that first book, I have written nine more books of realistic teen fiction in the “True­-to-Life Series from Hamilton High,“ published by Morning Glory Press. These books all deal with difficult issues and situations that many teens must face, issues such as teen pregnancy, rape, racism, abortion, school failure, lack of family support, sexual identity crises, sexual abstinence, mixed race heritage, and on and on.

I no longer write notes to my kids to feed the dog, and my shopping lists are very short because my husband and I eat out so often. Except for occasional school visits, teacher workshops, and short term writing classes, I am retired from teaching.

Now, in my seventies, I finally gained the luxury of immersing myself in long, uninterrupted writing days. It is a once barely recognized dream come true. But as much as I love the long writing days, nothing compares with the experience of going to the mailbox or opening my email and finding  a message from a far away reader telling me how one of my stories has, in some way large or small, affected that person's life.

It seems that whenever I think I may go back to writing essays, or write my memoir, I get a letter from a reader who says something like, "your book helped me see that my life was not lost . . ." Or maybe the message will be from a teacher, saying "your books have turned non-readers into insatiable readers, as well having opened up areas for sensitive discussions . . ." And then I think about what you, my readers, ask for during school visits. Something about suicide, or drugs, or gangs, or terminal disease, or the loss of a parent, or. . . or. . . or. . . and I'm again struck by how important it is to explore life through realistic fiction.  Then I close my computer files titled "memoir," and "personal essays," and "family stories," and I open a new one, "No Easy Answers," which has been the beginning working title for every book I've ever written, and which will hold true for the next one.