Thousands of years ago, an ice dam holding back Lake Missoula repeatedly broke apart, releasing floods that carved much of the Pacific Northwest. Long before that, an inland sea covered what is now Montana, leaving fossilized seashells high in the mountains.

Nepal area impacted by recent flood. Columbia River basin scoured by multiple glacier collapse generated floods over the millennia.

– AI-generated editorial illustration

This is often where inspiration begins for me—not with a plot, but with the collision of seemingly unrelated things. A seashell on a mountain. A vanished inland sea. News from Nepal too terrible to be treated merely as metaphor, yet impossible to keep outside the imagination. Some ideas arrive through dreams; others enter as nightmares.

This week, thoughts of upheaval and impermanence became deeply personal when my mother-in-law, Ivanka, died. Her absence is moving through our family with its own landslide force. Grief does not change what happened, it only rearranges the lives that remain.

Author Life

Somewhere amid these convergences, my new novel is taking shape. Music and time keep entering its pages, along with a fossil from that ancient Montana sea and the unsettling possibility that the past does not disappear. It changes form—and sometimes rises unexpectedly into the present.