I write half underground in a 10 by 10 room painted marine blue. One wall faces a tall white bookcase stacked with classical piano music from childhood, and a hardcover set of the Kasaysayan, books which tell the story of the Filipino people. Another wall peeks upward into a garden. It's hunkering down willingly for a long Ann Arbor winter.
By December 2016 I will say goodbye to my work as a clinical and international psychologist and perturb the universe differently through writing and photography. That's my dialectic: invention using real details versus realism with unique light and angles.
I am a published non-fiction (Almost Grown, W.W. Norton) and creative non-fiction writer (Memoir-And). The past two years I've driven monthly from Michigan to Chicago to study fiction with Fred Shafer (Northwestern University MFA Program) and his novel writers. My own novel, about the reverberations of a family tragedy into the lives of several cousins, is half completed.