Born and raised in Hawaii, I come from a family of storytellers. My father was a sailor who served in World War II. He told tales of landing on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, and how he later sought a quiet life here in the tropics. My mother was a botanist who traveled throughout the south Pacific gathering plant specimens and often finding plants that were once thought extinct. During the war she wasn’t “Rosie the Riveter” but Evangeline the Welder, building airplanes in San Diego.

As a child I sat enraptured at my mother’s kitchen table, listening to their stories. I can remember a night when my parents friends came over for dinner and the adults were deep in conversation. One of their kids begged me to come play with them. I said, “wait a minute, I want to hear how this story ends.”

That was the beginning of my storytelling career. It took me to studying Journalism, working in television production and now to my career as a novelist.