About Me

For the record, I feel dumb writing this. It feels like I’m either writing an acceptance speech for a Rotary Club citizen’s award or my obituary.

My story begins with three children and a life that felt like a roller coaster. All the time. Everything moved so quickly, I hardly could catch a breath to figure out where I was going or what I was doing.

I tried to carve out ways to slow down, but it took persistence I didn’t have capacity for. This was exacerbated by the fact that for the last seven years, we have been living in our 100-year-old house in Charlottesville while my husband did the renovations. Incidentally, Keith is not a builder, carpenter, or contractor. He’s a graphic designer with an eye for detail, a head for spatial relations, and a love of do-it-yourself manuals.

It seemed that there were few ways to slow down that I could regularly count on. One was cooking. So, weekends would find me making elaborate meals—relishing the process, and the feeling of sitting down together as a family to linger over crispy-skinned roast chicken fragrant with herbs, quick-sautéed spinach with garlic and a drizzle of peppery olive oil, and mashed potatoes creamy with butter and heady with gruyere.

Besides the need to slow down, Keith and I wanted our children to learn that our way of doing life is not the only way. There is so much beauty in the world, beyond our corner of it. Keith and I always knew we’d want to live abroad at some point. I was born in Panama, and then moved to Brussels, and then the United States. Plus my father is from—and still lives on—the border of Mexico and Arizona, and my mother didn’t arrive in New York from France until she was in grade school. I think my early diet of coquille st jacques and carne asada served to create a need in me to experience something other than life in Suburbia, USA. A three-month backpacking trip through Europe while in college enlivened this desire.

We also wanted our children to learn another language, and thus a different way of thinking.

When our youngest was born, we decided on a five year plan. Five years, and we’d move to Italy. A year or two into the plan, I decided I didn’t just want to live in Italy. I wanted to write about it. Where ever we are challenged we are learning, and I knew that leaving behind our home, our connections, our way of living would create opportunities for making realizations. Realizations that perhaps are only useful to me, but perhaps are worth sharing. In any case, the process of writing would allow me to explicate my experience and deepen my thinking.

And so I wrote my blog, Il Bel Centro. A chronological narration of our experience moving abroad to Spello, with all the attendant joys and tears, and triumphs and terrors. A window into my attempt to dig deeper, to really live, to create space to discover the things that matter to me. A year to strengthen our family which can often seem fractured in the wake of our too-busy American lives. A year to learn a language and stretch my brain circuits to capacity. A year to remove what is known and see what lies beneath. A year to find ways to the beautiful center.

After our return in 2013, I spent two years editing the blog to prepare it for publication. Il Bel Centro: A Year in the Beautiful Center launched in July of 2015. Though I had insisted IBC would be my only contribution to the literary landscape, two months later found me in the thick of a story, told in four volumes, the Santa Lucia series. This time, I got to create my own town, modeled heavily on Spello. The four books star the kind of characters that populate small town Italy—I love hearing from readers how the books make them feel like they have magically transported to the Italian peninsula. You can get the first of those bestselling books for free by signing up for my once-monthly newsletter, the Grapevine, which also allows you to keep up with my travels and taste adventures.

After writing four books in the Santa Lucia series, I gathered other traveling parents to create a manual to help others families leap into the arms of adventure. I’m so proud of how The Road Taken: How to Dream, Plan, and Live Your Family Adventure Abroad has encouraged people to create new paths for themselves.

Since then, I’ve been working on my new Murder in an Italian Village series. Such fun to create a new Italian hill-town with its own cast of characters, dramas, mythology, and, yes, murders. But these are cozy mysteries, which means no gore. Plus they star an amateur sleuth, a half-Italian chef named Stella, who uses her culinary wisdom to solve crimes (with her cat at her side). You can see why I’m having such fun writing these books! The first of the series is Death in Aramezzo. As with all my books, you can find it right here on my website, along with anywhere you like to get your books.

This is all more than you wanted to know, isn't it? :)

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