When Minnesotan Lyle Holloway steps off the boat on the dock of San Juan La Laguna, Guatemala, she doesn’t know she’s headed toward both an actual landslide and a figurative one. Her arrival is meant as a surprise for her boyfriend, who is in the small town on a temporary work assignment studying soil conditions in the surrounding mountains, but before she has a chance to fix her hair and change into clean clothes, she overhears him with another woman. On a morning hike to watch the sunrise over famous Lake Atitlan she is swept toward disaster and the beach below in a series of massive landslides, more than likely caused by her ex’s experiments.

Her recovery keeps her in the small town, where the glut of American tourists dries up after news of the landslides. She stays long enough to grow attached to the people who helped her survive the landslide and the women who teach her to weave. She basks in the hospitality of the locals and her attempts to repay kindness with charity backfire in big and small ways.

Saddled with a concussion, mounting debt, tuition, and lost work hours, she struggles to get ahead or even back to where she was before the landslide. Raised by a strict accountant, Lyle knows how and why to keep a budget, but she refuses to become her mother. Every move she makes, every designer handbag or enameled skillet she sells won’t stop her downward spiral. After time away from her cubicle Lyle chafes at the return to corporate life. And she can’t escape the expectations of her family --- her mom wants her married, her younger sister wants cousins for her own children, her dad wants everybody to calm down.

When the small town in Guatemala finds its way to Minnesota in the person of a local minister expecting Lyle to come through with promised money for the victims of the landslide, Lyle must learn she can sell just about everything to keep from humiliating herself.

George Obermeyer had always been a compliant son—if a little preachy and full of himself. But when he ends up in the hospital during his junior year of college suffering from frostbite and delusions, he refuses to do what his mother wants. While she pushes for medical intervention to avoid scandal in their blame-and-shame Catholic community, George accepts his visions as a sort of communion with an unnamed entity. Despite his family’s concern, George slips away, convinced his situation is spiritual not medical.

After George’s disappearance, his father writes unsent letters documenting the quirky ups and downs of the large family George has left behind. Despite certain gifts that may or may not be related to George’s behavior, his four siblings don’t entirely believe in healing touch, prophetic dreams, or ESP. But they know enough to keep quiet about them.

For decades, George, completely separated from his family, works at food shelves and homeless shelters—a calling he finds both soul- and ego-gratifying. This monastic life is upended when a ghost from a car accident years before appears and sends George home. With George’s return, the Obermeyers must reconcile their past.

Spanning the thirty years of George’s disappearance, A DANDELION CROWN IN WINTER is part ghost story and part family saga with a snaggle-tooth sense of faith.

In 2008, I cofounded Turtle Quarterly, a multi-genre print and online literary magazine. We published emerging and established poets, writers, essayists, and artists from Minnesota and across the country including: Sharon Chmielarz, Marya Hornbacher, Diane Jarvenpa, Kathryn Kysar, Mary Moore Easter, Lynne Rossetto Kaspar, Joyce Sutphen, and Connie Wanek.

I hosted public readings, which were held in local coffee shops, libraries and cafes, and accompanied the publication of each issue of TQ. We built a subscription base of loyal fans, both contributors and friends of TQ. Originally established to publish and distribute the work of a small group, TQ quickly grew, submissions flooded in, and TQ entered into the public conversation.

I have taken writing classes at the Loft Literary Center and was part of a long-term poetry group. My writing has appeared in Tangletown News, and On the Move, for which I was Guest Editor in Winter 2001, as part of Melpomene Institute for Women’s Health Research. I also wrote successful grant proposals on behalf of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts for the McKnight Foundation and Jerome Foundation. At the Minnesota Department of Human services I did technical writing and also revised and updated social service brochures and manuals. As a publicist, I wrote and prepared press releases, media tour pitch letters, and press kits for Simon & Schuster Trade Publishing Group.