about the author
I write fantasy about beauty beside horror, warmth beside grief, and wonder beside violence—about people trying to make meaningful choices inside worlds that do not make those choices easy. I think of this as a kind of chiaroscuro: darkness makes the light more vivid, and light makes the darkness matter.
Outside writing, I used to be cool enough (or fool enough) to throw myself out of perfectly good airplanes. I have a particular fondness for the view from places where sensible people might reasonably ask why anyone decided to go there.
These days I travel on foot more than I fly, but I’m still drawn to places and paths rich with accumulated story. The thought that I should walk the Camino de Santiago came to me while hiking in the forest here on Vancouver Island, so I went. (Some preparation required).
The Camino is full of names and legends that make landscapes feel larger than themselves: Compostela as the legendary “field of stars,” the Milky Way as a pilgrim road across the heavens, and Fisterra—from finis terrae, “the end of the earth”—waiting beyond Santiago on the Costa da Morte, the Coast of Death.
Once I learned there was a path to the end of the world, of course I had to keep walking.