Chance Meeting Leads to Publishing with Scribners

When my children began going to school in the 1960s, I began writing fiction while they were in class, just for my own satisfaction. I was interested to discover that I was pretty good at it.

One evening at dinner, knowing there was a PTA meeting in the school library that I had no previous intention of going to, I suddenly ‘knew’ I had to go to it – why? I had no idea.

At the meeting there was a woman who was new to town. She had come mostly to meet some of the other parents at the school. Sharing info with her, I learned that her husband was a sales rep. for Scribners publishers in NYC, and that he was interested in work by unknown writers, to send off to an editor in the NY office. Why not? I figured, and showed her some of my work – mostly bits and pieces of this and that. And then I forgot about it until I received a letter from the head editor asking me to complete the “Book” and send it to them. The BOOK?

In short, I wrote “the book” and indeed, it was published the following year as Earth Below, Heaven Above,  starting my lifelong career as a writer. To date, I’ve written and published (not all with Scribners, though) another 16 books – one of which, published in 1994, called Synchronicity: The Anatomy of Coincidence.