Here in Vermont, we’re enjoying 2011– The Year of the Never Ending Winter. I took this photo of my patio furniture this morning.  Snow in April is actually fairly common, but it still feels wrong somehow. Yet this is part of what I love about Vermont. The pattern of the seasons here has sunk into my blood in a way that is partly because my family has lived here for five generations. And yet, every year is different.  Yesterday morning while I was in the shower, our house shook with a terrifying rumble. I panicked and thought that our furnace, which is elderly and has given us many problems lately, had decided to launch into orbit. I leapt out, all soapy, only to discover a tremendous thunderstorm had blown up from nowhere. This morning, I woke to a dull white haze outside my window — a snow squall worthy of January. Where I live, it is not an easy transition from season to season. We learn to accept. Vermont is a land of contrasts — sharp beauty of mountains and lakes juxtaposed against failing farms and poverty just below the pristine surface.  We’re like everywhere else, and yet we’re different, too. I don’t think it was an accident that Vermont led the country in passing a law to allow civil unions a few years ago. Long winters around the woodstove have bred a people used to thinking a thing through, seeing it from all sides, and then deciding what is right and what is wrong from inside, from where it really matters, not from political agendas. Like Vermont, I am a person of contrasts — a mother, an educator, and a writer of gay erotica. And I’m having no trouble at all with who I am, inside.

Anyway, for those of you who are here looking for gay erotica and found patio furniture, don’t worry — I can do erotica, too. Stay tuned for future posts with excerpts from my fiction and glimpses into what I’m working on now, and who I am.