Happy Friday! (Perhaps it is Friday as you read this, but don’t those two words just lift your heart a little, even if it’s not? I’m a storyteller; it’s always Friday here.)

To satisfy that understandable desire to know another human, here are a few details that make me—Nell:

I’m the first child of three, born in the mountains of western North Carolina. But growing up our music and theatre-loving family also lived in a tiny mill town in eastern Massachusetts and in the largest town in western New York State. I graduated with honors in Art from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (a liberal arts college in Virginia which has since admitted men and changed its name) and then finally returned to the shelter of the Smokies where I earned a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. It was a joy to live and work among the ridges and valleys of East Tennessee for many years and it will always be a heart-home. For now, I rest my head among sycamores and burr oaks in the dreamy horse country of central Kentucky.

So far in life, I’ve been a violinist, a pastry chef, an exchange student to West Germany just before the Berlin Wall came down, a member of a secret society, an amateur actor, a novice kayaker, and a licensed architect. But after practicing architecture for a decade I started itching for a different kind of creative thinking. Spinning words into stories; a habit I’d played with before, but put aside to focus on how created space affects communities. And so I began to draft worlds for imagined people instead of tactile places in wood and steel.

Joyful things I try to keep close: pita chips with hummus and blueberries, chocolate truffles and milky black tea, music, trees, rain, moss, hound dogs, and mountains where black bears roam.

A sampling of my favorite writers across my life and genres: Ray Bradbury, Jacqueline Carey, e.e. cummings, Evie Dunmore, Charlaine Harris, Seamus Heaney, Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula Le Guin, C.S. Lewis, Kelly Link, Anne McCaffrey, Thomas Merton, Karen M. Moning, Naomi Novik, Mary Oliver, Mary Renault, Maria V. Snyder, Maggie Stiefvater, Sabaa Tahir, Laini Taylor, and Jeff Zentner.

Inspiring places I love to revisit often: the Red River Gorge in Kentucky, the Great Smoky Mountains, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Acadia National Park in Maine, Iona and all the Hebrides of Scotland, Freiburg im Breisgau – Germany, Sacro Bosco di Bomarzo – Italy, and Monemvasia – Greece.