What is the title of your latest release?
NARCISSI
What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
Each of ten women is at a turning point in her life when she meets Cole Burnett, a charismatic Texas novelist who keeps moving on, driven by loneliness and a search for purpose. Confusing love and sex comes easy at midlife and there are consequences.
How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
I’m in love with the Texas landscape and the complicated people who live here. In the 1980s when the novel begins, it was a generally optimistic place to be. A person at midlife, like Cole, could dream about the work he wanted to do. (Novelists, then, were big celebrities.) And the excitement of sexual adventure without consequences (post pill, pre-AIDS) could be overwhelmingly appealing to a person long married, as he had been. The women he meets are struggling with a variety of life issues—each one is at a pivotal stage. The last thing they feel is free, so his idea of freedom would be a foreign language to them. Because Texas allows him to be on the move like this within a consistent cultural framework, it lets us see a much more rounded character in Cole and wonder about a richer variety of responses among the women.
Would you hang out with your heroine in real life?
Sure, all ten of them. Maybe the ex-wives, too. There’d be plenty to talk about, even if we limited ourselves to Cole. Several of these women have experienced life-altering trauma and survived.
What are three words that describe your hero?
Sexy, sensitive, human —if it’s Cole. If it’s the women, I’d say: brave, resourceful, determined.
What’s something you learned while writing this book?
That I really love the novel-in-linked stories form; I love being able to go into the minds and hearts of many characters who interact in surprising ways. And I was fascinated by the way it let us experience time—moving forward in their lives, seeing who many of them became and how the past really wasn’t past at all, as Faulkner pointed out.
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I do both, many times. For a long while, I begin each day’s work by reading from the beginning (and of course making changes). One good thing about linked stories is you don’t have to start with page 1. You can just concentrate on one story at a time. But eventually you will need to make sure about the overall narrative arc, and the flow—as with more traditional novels.
What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
Blue Bell Chocolate Lava Cake ice cream, if I can find it.
Describe your writing space/office!
Cluttered! It’s part of our front porch, enclosed ten years ago. I write on an old beat-up desk from New Mexico amid stacks of papers and notes and a paper calendar. There’s a napping bed behind me where my late husband used to rest, but it now holds work materials I’m not finished with. To my left is a bank of windows looking out at our slope and two birdbaths. In spring, azaleas bloom right there, pink and white, shaded by a large live oak. In front of me a wall of bookshelves frames a window—some of my husband’s books and mine are intermingled. On the windowsill I keep a photo of him beside the urn containing his ashes.
Who is an author you admire?
Can’t pick just one. So: Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, Richard Powers, Leon Hale, Margaret Renkl, Ann Patchett.
Is there a book that changed your life?
I think the truth is they all did - and do. But I guess it would have to be a combination of Alice Munro (who showed me what short stories could be) and Leon Hale (who taught me about the real Texas, which I needed, although I was born here).
Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published). Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
I started Winedale Publishing in 1996 and published books by a variety of Texas authors, many of them previously published in New York. Winedale brought out my first book during the pandemic, two weeks before my husband died. NARCISSI was written in a burst of energy from grief in the two years thereafter that also produced my memoir, published in 2024. The novel was slated for publication by a respected regional university press that experienced a change of administration late in the process. That’s how Winedale came to publish it.
It’s funny about fiction. You feel such a responsibility to your characters. They only really live if their stories are read. If you don’t do everything you can to let them have their chance, you’ve actually abandoned them. I couldn’t do that. And so now, I’m hopeful readers will love Dolly and Amelia and Lorna and Elsa and Trish like I do. And understand Gladys and Stephanie—feel for them all as people. And care for Cole as I do.
What’s your favorite genre to read?
Character-driven literary fiction and mysteries like those written by Louise Penny and Ann Cleves
What’s your favorite movie?
Out of Africa; Crazy Horse
What is your favorite season?
Spring—wildflowers!
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Eating scratch-made chocolate cake and Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream in company with my late husband, now more a wish, and with my son and his family.
What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I love French crime shows with subtitles, like Astrid and Cassandre; I loved the new Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett novels, and PLAYGROUND by Richard Powers.
What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Mexican-all types
What do you do when you have free time?
I like to drive around Texas, slowly, on the backroads—when I can find one—with my dog.
What can readers expect from you next?
I’m working on another story collection and revising a novel mostly about doomed love in southern France and northern New Mexico.
Cole Burnett, a Texas novelist, is the kind of man whose need for freedom should send lovers running in the opposite direction. But he has a lanky charisma and the gift of listening, rare enough at any time.
The women he encounters in Narcissi, a novel‑in‑stories, find his attention compelling, and they all get hurt, or cause hurt. But hurt is never the whole story.
Each woman brings her own complicated life into her time with Cole, conflicts with husbands, traumas survived, needs postponed, children. And children grow up with questions.
Burnett understands that loneliness compels him toward the women he meets‑‑whether in a tavern, like Amelia; or a street dance, like Stephanie; or a hotel event, like Lorna. And others he connects with while working, like Dolly, Elsa, Trish and Gladys.
None of them quite reaches where the loneliness resides, where whatever’s missing pushes him to keep moving, to write more, to find a purpose for his future. Later, after the death threat, traveling becomes a way to stay alive.
Fiction Literary [ Winedale Publishing, On Sale: October 15, 2026, Paperback, ISBN: 9780975272770 / ]
NARCISSI: A Novel is my third book, published in October, 2026. It tells the stories of ten women and the man they cannot forget, a Texas writer who stays on the move. A degree of hurt is inevitable, but hurt is never the whole story.
A WALL OF BRIGHT DEAD FEATHERS is my collection of short stories that won the 2022 Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, the state's premier honor society for authors. THIS FAMILIAR HEART: An Improbable Love Story was my second book, a memoir, published in 2024.
I’ve been writing for publication since I was fifteen, but my passion—of the inanimate variety—is books. I’ve been a journalist, editor, publisher, part owner of a bookstore, and all the time writing fiction. All my books are set in Texas, where I live.
I hope you enjoy them.
No comments posted.
© 2003-2026