How did you start to write? . . . a friend asked me the other day. Here’s what I remembered: I am a single parent, and my daughter is in school. I am sitting on my bed, my notebook and pen in hand. Sunlight from corner windows makes the room bright, and outside the house, a field, almost devoid of trees, stretches in an open plain to the church. 

I am working on a sermon. 

It’s a good place to write sermons, quiet and undisturbed. I love to write, and I feel privileged to have this one day that’s actually part of my job, a day to myself, for study, contemplation, imagination, and writing. 

I have just finished my first year as a church minister. I’ve learned to stand up and speak to my congregation, preside at committee meetings, visit the sick, and all the other tasks of the minister’s life. And I’ve fallen in love with my parishioners.

But I am lonely. I miss my friends and colleagues. Suddenly I have found myself in a place and role that is isolated, set apart, no colleagues for miles, with none of the lively discussions I’d had at seminary or my internship year at a psychiatric hospital. 

On this day, though, I have learned to transform the loneliness into solitude. In loneliness I feel sorry for myself. In solitude I have a rich inner life.

In my solitude the contemplation and imagination begin to morph into a story. Two women with very different belief systems, struggling to make sense of their lives. Two sides of my own path spinning into new stories. 

Five years later, the two women, Brigid and Mary, find a meeting point on the path, and I find I have written a novel. Fifteen years later, after a writing program, countless workshops, writing groups, and many revisions, Sea Level is published.