A couple of years ago, as I drove across the country with my family from Connecticut to California, the drought in the southern states started me thinking about what’s going to happen to America when climate change really hits.  I figured we’d annex Canada and all move north.  It wasn’t the nicest idea, and it sparked deeper concerns about how power and politics might evolve in a crisis.  Once I threw in babies, too, I had the start of Gaia’s story.

People ask me how I became a writer, and the answer’s slow and simple.  Take my book-laced girlhood, and my friendship with my best pal neighbor, and my six wild, musical siblings, and my love for my husband and our goofy kids, and certain losses and fears, and my years of writing and teaching, and then put me on a couch with a computer. I try to write the best thing I can.

I wrote the first draft of Gaia’s story while on sabbatical in Tiburon, CA, and when I was stumped, I’d walk in the hills. I walked pretty much every day.