Curiosity about the world has been a lot of what’s motivated me from an early age. When I was away at sleep-away camp at age 11, I complained to my parents that the camp wouldn’t let me receive The New York Times every day. How could I last two months without knowing what was happening in the world?
Not surprisingly, much of my career has been in journalism, specifically magazine journalism, in print and online. I’ve been an editor at magazines including Ladies’ Home Journal, Self, Parenting, Prevention, Conceive, Physicians’ Life, Redbook, and Reader’s Digest . I’ve edited and written book reviews, news reports, investigations, travel writing, cookbooks, memoirs, and celebrity profiles for dozens of publications including New York Newsday, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Travel & Leisure, Town & Country, and Columbia Magazine. I love that I get paid to interview people, travel, read, and learn about new things. . . and then write about them to inform other people. I also love editing other people’s work, and helping it to be as clear and compelling as it can possibly be.
I’ve spent much of my career writing about health to help people understand how their bodies work, how to keep those bodies healthy, what the threats to health are, and how to prevent or treat problems. My grandfather, who lived to a healthy 95 years old, used to say, “When you have your health, you have everything,” and that’s part of what motivates my reporting and writing. My first book was The Healthy Traveler, with information for people about how to stay healthy when away from home. My second book, co-written with Leslie Laurence, was Outrageous Practices: How Medicine Mistreats Women, investigating how gender bias—often unintentional—has harmed women’s health by leaving women out of medical research, sometimes mistreating them as patients, and even keeping women physicians and scientists from progressing in their fields as they should.
I’ve always been a voracious reader of both fiction and non-fiction. But when I married a professor of literature and creative writing (Regal House Publishing author David Galef), I became interested in using my skills to work on fiction projects as well. David and I compiled our first anthology, 20 over 40—20 short stories written by writers over age 40, writing about midlife experience—a few decades ago. I absolutely loved tailoring my journalistic editing skills to edit literary fiction, too. And I’m thrilled to be co-editing 20 over 60, the follow-up to that anthology, showcasing the incredible talents of older writers.
Besides writing and editing, travel is another passion of mine. I’ve taken many photography classes and published some of my work. In fact, an alternate career for me, if I couldn’t write or edit any more, would be to travel the world and take photos…and hope someone would pay me for them. Travel for me isn’t all about the best museums, the most beautiful beaches, or the tastiest food. It’s seeing how other people live both in the United States and in countries far from our own. And seeing the common humanity underneath the trappings of varied geography, architecture, language, and fashion.
When I’m not traveling, I love spending time with my husband and son, who are both talented writers, and our Hemingway (extra-toed) cat who, in spite of his name, is not (a writer). One thing that I will probably never write is a memoir. I don’t think I’d ever feel like spending the time to write about myself when there are so many billions of people in the world I want to know more about.
