_ I chose landscape design as a profession because it balances the slow, sedentary nature of novel writing. Designs quickly become real, clients are happy, and I’ve hiked several miles per day placing plants and looking up at beautiful trees. I taught for ten years before that. Great, exhausting work, helping students enter the magic zone where each of us is at our best and the quest for meaning is rewarded. Before that, I had my own sailboat refinishing business. I helped sail a 44’ boat from Kauai to San Francisco, a process more boring than imagined. Once the horizon closes down, it’s you, your boat mates, your ship, eighteen days/nights, and once in a long while a glass float or really tired bird. I managed an independent bookstore while in college, the Waking Owl Book Company—a beloved Salt Lake City institution that housed the first Tibetan buddhist meditation center in Salt Lake City. Yes, I was a Dharma Bum. 

While getting an MFA in creative writing, I published two essays on Philip Larkin, using his first manuscript notebook and corresponding letters. The Reading Room of the British Museum is sacred ground. I loved seeing Larkin’s genesis as a poet.

I have devoted myself to writing, renovating houses, Argentine tango, tai chi, identifying wildflowers, cooking, gardening and canning the harvest. I believe most people would do better with less.
           
Give me an old three-speed bike and an afternoon off. I call that happy.

Chicken fried steak, green beans and warm blueberry pie went along with GUEST HOUSE truck stop readings which retraced Melba Burn's route from Portland, Oregon to Salt Lake City, Utah—in reverse. Last summer, I read my way from the Great Salt Lake desert to the high camas plains of Idaho, then down the great Columbia Gorge.

Readings included the tour kick-off in SLC on July 23, Boise on July 27, Troutdale on July 29. Thanks to all who came, and those who listened by accident. The Salt Lake Tribune and Portland Oregonian ran feature articles on the first literary Truck Stop Tour in the nation.

Truckers love to read. This I learned on tour. I  drove 1,750 miles in my mother's Buick Century and gave out 54 CDs of chapter one to truckers, bikers and truck stop employees. My friends encouraged me the entire way.

I took GUEST HOUSE to the people who made her. It was selfish really. I love home made pie.