… in a year unlike any other year in my life (youngest off to college with the first year’s bill figured out, grating loneliness and joyous solitude, so much writing and small publications, a radiant writing residency, new friendships, and my mother’s death — say this again, my mother’s death) Regal House Publishing, an Indie press in Raleigh, picked up my second novel, Call It Madness, pub date summer 2026.

Chapter One

            I didn’t know what made my parents drive from Bellingham to faraway Vermont the summer I turned four. I had never met my great-grandfather Opa until that afternoon my mother rolled our station wagon down Breadseed Lane. Earlier that day, a stranger had helped my parents change a flat tire on the New York turnpike, but the spare was a misfit. For hours, our car had been thumping while I stared through the backseat windows at the trees and fields passing by, pondering the puzzle of that strange word breadseed. Could seeds blossom into loaves? We hadn’t stopped for lunch, and I was hungry. Was this Opa character cooking us dinner? Turned out, he was not.