Completing Afterimages coincided with two big changes in my life. After many years of squeezing in a couple of writing hours before going off my day-time job as an educational researcher, and forgoing the relaxation of long weekends and vacations to work on stories and personal essays, I decided to make writing my main activity. My husband I also gave up our Manhattan loft, where we had lived for over four decades, to live in the woods.

These days I am working on a novel about an aged professor of German literature and his adult daughter. Since my father died suddenly when he was only fifty-nine and I was just twenty-four, writing this novel has giving me a chance to imagine a father-daughter relationship as it might have evolved. The novel has also given me a chance to bask in the German language and literature, which were so important to my youth.

To complement the deep solitary pleasures of writing, I have been teaching a memoir workshop at a local library. I also enjoy some educational consulting, and keeping both flower and vegetable gardens.