Shinbone Lane follows a runaway teenager in 1974 San Francisco who finds refuge and a found family in a hidden street of artists, misfits, quiet magic, and a wisecracking pigeon. What first sparked the idea for Shinbone Lane as a hidden pocket of San Francisco?

When I moved from San Francisco to Sonoma County about 20 years ago, I was looking for additional freelance writing work. I answered a Craigslist ad and met a young man at a coffee shop for an interview. The ongoing work he had in mind would have required more time than I had, so it wasn’t a good fit. Still, we enjoyed talking and shared things about our backgrounds. 

He was a Gen Xer; I’m a baby boomer. I told him about arriving in San Francisco in the 1970s with about $200 in my pocket. I thought I’d visit for a couple of weeks and wound up living there for almost 30 years. He said my early adventures in San Francisco sounded like a fairytale to him—something a young person couldn’t replicate so easily anymore. Housing had already become so much more expensive.

That conversation stayed with me. The idea of writing about that time sat on the back burner for years, gradually taking shape as I returned to it from time to time, until Shinbone Lane emerged.

San Francisco does have many real hidden pockets—places so beautiful they seem magical, and people so inventive and intriguing they seem magical too. I just followed my imagination where it wanted to go. As a storyteller, I’m drawn to spaces where reality tips into wonder. This is true for both my written work and for stories I tell live in performance.

Shinbone Lane almost feels alive. Did you think of the lane as a character?

Yes, I did. The area where I situated the lane is one I’m very familiar with. I lived near the corner of 29th and Sanchez streets for eighteen years, so I walked our dog up the 29th Street hill and drove up to Diamond Heights to shop routinely. That steep hill feels like a part of me now.

Shinbone Lane, an imagined side street easy to miss when driving by, became a living, breathing presence with its own rhythms and moods. 

Place has always been important in my work, and Northern California continues to shape my imagination. It was a great amount of fun bringing the lane to life and letting it influence the characters who find their way there.

Found family is central to the story. Why is that theme important to you, and why was it important that the community be imperfect, messy, and sometimes conflicted?

I think almost all of us have some issues to work out with our families when we grow independent as young adults. For some, the issues are minor and family support is a constant. For others, too much trauma stands in the way of family ties being anything but harmful at the time. And there are many shades in between.

It’s a blessing that people can find each other and build a supportive base that becomes a different kind of family. How lucky we are to be able to do that for one another.

As for the community being imperfect, messy, and sometimes conflicted, that reflects both life in this world of ours and my approach to storytelling. And while I want love to be the most powerful force in the end, I don’t shy away from the complications that come with being human.

I lost both of my parents by the time I was eleven, so there’s an undercurrent of loss and darkness that finds its way into my work. At the same time, I am optimistic and delight in my connections with loved ones, as well as the beauty in the world. That tension between light and shadow, hope and hurt is something I return to often, and I hope it resonates with readers.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

I’m at work on another magical realism novel, Ripplewood, set in an out-of-the-way town of that name in Sonoma County, California. The town was named for a forest of ripplewood trees that once existed, though now only one remains, deep in the woods. It’s the same kind of tree that appears in front of Ted’s home on Shinbone Lane, but this book is not a sequel.

The story begins with Emlyn Grady driving home. She was raised in Ripplewood and has been attending San Francisco State University for six years, changing majors along the way and still not quite finding her footing. When she receives a text from her father urging her to come home immediately because of a crisis, she drops everything—including an important meeting her boyfriend has arranged with investors interested in his startup—and heads directly to Ripplewood.

There she finds out her mother is missing, but she’s gone missing before. So what could have happened is a mystery in a town where family roots and history are imperfect, complicated, messy, conflicted and unresolved (of course). There is folklore unique to Ripplewood, but how much is real, how much is fiction and what effect it has had on the town is a topic debated without resolution by the locals. In this setting, the story begins to unfold. And like Shinbone Lane, the story’s layers reveal themselves over time. 

I’m interested in how place, memory, and inherited stories shape us, and how we decide what to carry forward. I’m still in the process of writing and discovering the full shape of the book, which is one of the things I love most about the work. I hope to finish the book this year and publish it in 2027.

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