Life is full of change. Most of us experience major changes even if we are born, raised and live in one place the whole time. For me, that wasn’t the case. Born in Texas,  I lived most of my childhood in the northeast part of Idaho and Washington state.

After graduating from high school I spent four years in the Navy. Then I spent the next 26 years as a nun in a cloistered monastery where I thrived for a long time until it didn’t seem to work for me anymore. I left the monastery in 2010 and moved to Oregon and then in a few years met my future husband and moved to Vancouver, Washington.

Vancouver is a center point of Indigenous, European and American history. I found the perfect part time job working in a small bookstore at the Fort Vancouver National Historic site. It was here that my love of Vancouver grew as I became aware of the rich past, present and future threads of life in Southwest Washington.

In 2022 I wrote and published a local guidebook, Explore Vancouver Washington. This year, in April of 2026 I published the second edition with expanded material, photos and a complete index. 

When I was in the monastery I started up and ran a small Catholic radio station. Radio was one of the things I deeply missed in my new life. In 2022 I discovered that I could host a radio show on KXRW.fm and so I started Northwest Book Talk.

About this same time I joined a small historical group for the Covington House. It was here I got the fun idea of doing a small book fair. In the third year of the book fair as it got bigger than what could be done at Covington House, I partnered with KXRW.fm to hold the fair at the artillery barracks at Fort Vancouver.

This year KXRW wanted to add a “Media Fest” component to the book fair platform which developed it into something even bigger. We moved it to Clark College and for a lot of different reasons (rainy weather being one factor) was was not as widely attended as we had hoped.

Plans are still in the making for 2027 with possibly skipping a year till 2028.