I create stories that are tinged with heartache but end with joy. I grew up devouring the British classics. Jane Eyre is a favorite, and a good example of what I model my writing on. I like a character who is upright, but whose resolve is tested through difficult circumstances. On the crafty end of things, I love embroidering tapestry pillows. I work from a pattern – I’m not enough of a visual artist to create the image, but it does take a lot of focus and dedication to complete a project. Most will be about 33,000 stitches and take me about a year.

I write because I love beautiful words. One of my favorite authors is Kate Morton. Her stories are enthralling, but even more poignant to me are her word choices. They are exactly right. My mother drilled me in vocabulary growing up and I get a charge finding the precise word needed in a given moment. I also thoroughly enjoy the research that goes into historical fiction. I have learned about a Welsh patron saint of lovers, how to change a diaper on a train in the early 20th century, and how to best cultivate broccoli. Just to name a few of the strange places that writing can take an author! For the tapestries, I make them because there is something so satisfying about working with your hands and seeing instant results of your labors. I am struck by how tapestries are analogous to life. We often see the messy side not knowing how beautiful the other side will be if we only press on.

Dr Pepper! As any good Texan girl will know, there is no period after Dr in that brand. I love it chilled, I love it with crushed ice, I love the ones bottled in Dublin, TX, and I love drinking it through a frozen Twizzlers straw. (Try it!) I also go to a farmers’ market nearly every weekend. It is such a treat to try locally made and sourced products and to talk to the farmers/artists/crafters themselves. Finally, I consume travel. I’ve been to most of the states and four continents and have a bucket list that is ever-growing. The world is a beautiful place, and I love meeting its people.

I am the least crafty person I know, and I say this with genuine sadness. I can’t draw or paint, I can barely color, I can’t sew, ditto for knitting and crochet…the list goes on. But I can create a killer bourbon-based cocktail, with only minor modifications to other people’s recipes. Creative copying is an art, right? There’s that great book by Austin Kleon called “Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative.” I highly recommend it (plus, at the moment, it takes the heat off me.)

Mae West said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better.” To paraphase (inelegantly), I’ve been a writer and I’ve not been a writer, and being a writer has been better. The times I’ve strayed from writing and exclusively focused on other things just haven’t been nearly as satisfying or fulfilling. So I come back, and I create.

What do you consume?

I’m a novelist and freelance journalist and a mother. So, I create books and stories and, I guess you could say that that one glorious time, I created a whole human being. And he’s an utter delight.

I create because storytelling has always intrigued me. It’s at the core of being a human being. It’s what makes us, us. I write to try to understand this world and our place in it. I write to gain perspective, to learn about things far beyond me, and—I hope—to entertain. I want to give readers a glimpse into someone else’s experience and dig into real-world emotions to maybe help us navigate through the lumps and knots in life a little better.

THE THUNDER BENEATH US gets into some heavy things: shame, guilt, identity, secrets, complicated family dynamics, love, and grief. There’s a lot of emotion in each of these issues on their own. I write to maybe sort through all of it.

What do you consume?

As a novelist, as well as an occasional nonfictionist of essays and articles, I strive to create conversations–between myself and my readers, my readers and each other, myself and the world. I construct journeys also, both metaphorically and geographically. I’m an expat writer and inveterate traveler, and my work tends to follow suit: my first novel, An Unexpected Guest, was set in Paris, also Dublin and Boston; my new novel, Shining Sea, opens in Southern California and travels to the remote Hebrides islands off the western coast of Scotland and back, with many stops in between.

You could say that, as a writer of literary fiction, I create worlds also. Certainly, that’s how they feel to me. My characters become very real to me; I launch them into existence and then they take over.

Honestly? Compulsion. I can’t imagine living in any other way. Even as the tiniest girl I was making up stories—continuing ones too, like little novels in my head. I’d lie in my bed at night while the rest of the house was asleep, letting them flit through my head like shadows across the ceiling.

What do you consume?