I am Anglo-Welsh-Corsican ‘by adoption’  and began scribbling stories as soon as I could hold a pen.

I grew up in a village called Bampton, near Oxford in England. My dad was the schoolmaster and our house in the centre of the village was at the hub of community. I loved village life and roamed the countryside. In the 17th century I would surely have been labeled a ‘hoyting girl.’

I wrote poetry – ‘the winter sun was shining bright, the ponies prancing with delight’ – and short stories about school clocks, playing truant to catch tadpoles, and Arthurian knights rescuing damsels in distress – I was always the knight!

My career as a storyteller declined from age nine, when I was given a pony. It crashed altogether, at 14, when I outgrew my pony and discovered boys…

        

Six years at Cambridge University gave me a husband, my first son, two degrees and honed writing skills. I researched and wrote papers for academic symposia, historical and socio-economic journals.

In ‘Thatcher’s Britain’, I metamorphosed from a university research and community development into co-founding and leading a 30-person European management consultancy where children and animals were as welcome as our clients.

My writing stretched to accommodate business speeches, proposals and newsletters, book chapters on ethics, and training manuals for organization development. My fascination with Jungian psychology bloomed into work across several continents, from the USA to Eastern Europe and Southern Africa, where I introduced Psychological Type and Process-oriented Psychology to people working in life-and-death situations to transform their lives, their communities and their countries.

Between Nelson Mandela’s release and the first majority elections, I worked in South Africa, to help facilitate the transfer of power.

What an honour to land where history was being written daily through the courageous efforts of ordinary/extraordinary people to create a new and more equal nation.

Sub-Saharan Africa presented a fresh writing challenge: how to persuade individuals and institutions to give money and resources to help people emerge from such difficult situations?

Fundraising proposals and reports attracted private and public funding. Through this, I then had the good fortune to project manage multi-disciplinary research and development initiatives in Rwanda, Zambia, Kenya and South Africa.

My passion to foster development from the grassroots enables me to enjoy close relations with schools, community groups and farming coops as well as with international public and private institutes of higher learning and  aid organizations.

I’ve learned about true community from indigenous people of many nations,

After emigrating to Southern California in 2001, my Africa travel for development work continued for more than a decade. Meanwhile, my storytelling muscles began to  flex again, perhaps influenced by the air in the City of Angels, where every other person seems to have a book or a film script on the go!

The Story behind the Story (https://www.nightsoftheroad.com/?p=6) tells how Nights of the Road came to be born. Having at last come ‘out of the closet’ with this novel, I returned to a trilogy that germinated in the 90’s, during life on the beautiful island of Corsica in the Mediterranean. The Corsican Trilogy is slow in gestation, as it follows the cross continental fortunes of a family caught up in 18th century revolution in Europe, America and Australia.

If you’ve made it this far through my bio, you’ll have noticed that my life has taken many twists and turns. Since 2015 – when I accepted an invitation from Richard Rudd http://www.genekeys.com to co-found the Gene Keys Society, with its international core, ‘Multilingual Matters’ – my novel writing has been suspended.

With Richard and colleagues, I co-led the first Gene Keys Ambassador Program Retreat in Scotland in 2019 and last year travelled to Scotland, Germany, Czechia, Hungary and Russia to work and play with Gene Keys friends.

Research for The Corsican Trilogy and a sequel to Nights of the Road continues still, albeit in slow time, and I trust all I have learned from the Gene Keys transmission will enrich the writing process, when I again put on my author hat.

I’m blessed to live today in the Santa Monica Mountains just outside Los Angeles, with my rock musician husband.

Adventuring with Mark, and visiting my many children and grandchildren around the world in Australia, Ireland and Corsica means that life is never dull!