About Me

I always enjoy telling people I’m an American-born German author living in Spain. It’s fun to see the confused look on their faces while they process the statement. I write in English and German, both literary fiction and, starting more recently, practical guides (“How to” books).

My home has been Sitges, in the province of Barcelona, the autonomous community of Catalonia, Spain, for a good many years. When my husband and I moved here, I was planning to retire, but I quickly discovered writing is not so easy to get away from.

Having already finished a Young Adult novel, The War on Science Goes Batshit, I continued writing short fiction. I eventually decided to publish some of my better stories under the title Death and Other Life-Changing Events, a collection exploring the moments that quietly change our lives. (Available in German as Die großen und die kleinen Dinge.)

Here in Sitges, my husband and I bought a small apartment in the center of the old town. The place had a tourist license when we bought it, and we ran an up-market Airbnb for some eleven years while we rented our own accommodations.

As we settled more and more into life In Sitges, we finally sold the tourist rental and bought a small fixer-upper of a house, which we are slowly turning into our dream home. The complicated purchase of our second property in Catalonia inspired me to write a guidebook for foreigners wanting to buy real estate here. The book, Buying Property in Catalonia, Spain, and the German edition, Immobilienkauf in Katalonien, Spanien, were the result.

One discovery led to another. As readers began asking for worksheets, checklists and updates, I realized the books needed a home online. That idea grew into the Companion Resource Center, where I continue to add practical resources for readers of both my guides and my fiction.

My story began in a working-class family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. At a Catholic elementary school, the nuns instilled in me a lifelong respect for clear, grammatical English.

After high school I studied at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. A year in Bonn during my Junior Year Abroad convinced me that Europe was where I wanted to build my life. After graduating, I returned to Germany as a foreign-language teaching assistant, where I discovered educational publishing—and found my career.

I spent twelve years working for Germany’s largest educational publishing house, Cornelsen Verlag in Berlin. While working in West Berlin, I witnessed the peaceful protests in the East that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Some years later I became a German citizen.

After leaving Cornelsen, I went free-lance, first as an editor of English language textbooks and science and geography books in English for bilingual education.

Over the next twenty years I co-authored numerous English textbooks and educational materials used by hundreds of thousands of German students. Alongside these I wrote graded readers, scripts for educational television and other learning materials, always with the same aim: making complex subjects clear and accessible.

During a sabbatical, I spent a few months in Peru, where I met my partner. He moved to Germany, where we entered a civil union back in the day when same-sex partners couldn’t get married in Germany. We officially wed in Las Vegas a few years later, and we will be celebrating the silver anniversary of our “first wedding”, as we think of it, in 2028.

Whether I'm writing fiction or practical guides, I try to do the same thing: help readers see something more clearly than they did before. If my books leave readers feeling better informed, more confident or simply more thoughtful than when they began, I've achieved what I set out to do.

A few places I’ve called home:
Milwaukee • Madison • Bonn
Düsseldorf • Berlin • Peru • Sitges

Sitges’ iconic seafront church

The best part of a Milwaukee summer was always a backyard barbecue.

The Berlin Wall wasn’t a wall everywhere. My first apartment in Berlin looked out onto a watchtower in “no-man’s land” (1980).