Moving’s a bitch. Vacating her office on the campus of Oberlin College, Pam Fox encountered literal heavy lifting: twenty-five boxes of books, even after all the pruning she did before packing. Nobody teaches creative writing without lots of books. Walls of them.
She’d moved plenty of times, from her hometown near Boston to Bates College in Maine, then to Iowa City to complete her MFA at the Writers’ Workshop. Back in Massachusetts, she worked as a reporter for a daily newspaper before receiving a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center.
Then a second!
That was rare, and thrilling. In Provincetown she completed a poetry manuscript amid a stunning landscape: nearby Cape Cod National Seashore. A beech forest smothered by sand dunes appeared in one poem, the giant sculptures of sea ice washed ashore after the bay froze in another.
Back in Boston, a short stint as an EMT ended when a five-year-old died of asthma on the way to Massachusetts General Hospital. Pam assisted a paramedic who remained calm as a stone Buddha, but she decided emergency medicine wasn’t her day job. As an administrative assistant in a biology lab at MIT, she learned a prototype word processing program by practicing on her book manuscript. And kept submitting her work, adding to her pile of rejection slips.
When publication came, it changed her life. Her first book won the Yale award and scored her a teaching job at MIT, then a fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and eventually the faculty position in Ohio.
Moving again.
She thought it was a big deal. If she’d known what lay in store—
What lay in store was renting her house to a new professor and moving aboard a 26-foot Winnebago to roam North America. Her loyal companion, a black cat, loved only Pam, hissing and swiping her claws at anyone else.
Moving wasn’t a bitch anymore. It can’t be when you take your house with you: wherever you stop is home. The Winnebago became a condo on wheels.
RVing took Pam to beautiful natural spaces where she hiked, paddled, and biked. And it gave her the idea of writing novels with a protagonist who lived the joyful, spontaneous way she did.
Meet Kate Corliss, skilled artist and observant naturalist, who comes to life in the five-book series The Art of Murder.