At the age of ten, I made a new friend. She was new to town and settled into an older neighborhood close enough to school so she could walk to it. Her father had seven mouths to feed on a graduate student’s stipend, so they settled into a dilapidated house with peeling wallpaper and a sagging wrap-around porch.

It might have shocked my friend to learn I believed her the luckiest girl in the world. The neglected Victorian made me wild at the thought of tattered letters tucked in books with words whispering secrets about people I’d never met, halos of dried flowers worn by hopeful brides wrapped lovingly in yellowed-white silk, trunks upon trunks of mysterious odds and ends once important enough to save but not important enough to remember. Trifles for the next generation—clutter to be rifled through and sorted for the donation bin. The thought had unsettled me. Not trifles, my heart protested—treasures belonging to people with stories just as important as our own.

I worked up the courage to ask her mom if there were things in their attic, and please may I—we—go up and look at them? "I don’t know what’s up there," she said, with an odd look in her eyes. "We’ve never gone up and looked." They had never even looked? What if there were gold lockets with miniature painted faces or a diary written from inside the Alamo while Texans awaited their doom or the even lost bones of Amelia Earhart herself? I didn’t care for gold, but I did care for the stories old things could tell. I burned with the unknown every time I visited my friend and saw the small door at the top of the stairs leading to secrets I would never know.

Writing is my way of looking into the attic so I can bring those people's stories into the light of day.

When I'm not nose-deep in research, I teach literature and writing to high school and university students. The favorite part of my day is talking to my four teenagers about life and spending time with my rascal of a labradoodle, Miso, and my rescue poodle, Ginger. I couldn't do any of this without my husband, who helps me do what I love.