Moved to Boston to become an editor at Allyn & Bacon, where I miss the Blizzard of 1978 but am just in time for the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, which I survive.
I begin my career in college textbook publishing at Wadsworth Publishing Co., atop a hill in Belmont, California. It was a lot like working at the Eagles’ Hotel California.
I finish my Master’s degree in Comparative Literature coursework at Sonoma State College (California) and begin writing my magnum opus thesis, “Transfiguration and the Feminine Principle in D. H. Lawrence, Andre Gide and Thomas Mann,” which I don’t finish until 1982.
I write my first short story at age 15, “The Red Eye,” published in the Rapid City High School literary chapbook, Paha Sapa Sketches. It wasn’t the first story I wrote, but it was better by at least a car length).
My mom gave our first dog a French name, Desirée. We called her Dizzy. I love dogs and have had one almost all my life. Today, Shiou-Mei is a Wheaten terrier, fifteen years young.
