About Shelby
I didn't set out to become an author. I followed my curiosity here.
I've been writing for most of my life, although for a long time I wouldn't have called myself a writer. I was a little girl with a journal. I wrote down my questions, my feelings, the things I couldn't quite make sense of. Sometimes I took that first journal outside with me and sat beside a stream to write. I still have it, along with every journal I've written since. Looking back, I can see that the page was one of the first places I learned to listen to myself. I've always been someone who follows the thing that catches my attention. A book. A conversation. A dream. Something growing in my garden. A place I've never been. A question I can't quite let go of. For years, those curiosities seemed unrelated. Now I can see the thread. They taught me to pay attention.
From Journals to Fiction
I didn’t begin writing because I wanted to become an author. During a season when an injury made my physical world much smaller, I needed somewhere else for my curiosity to go. When my body couldn’t wander the way it once had, my imagination did. So I wrote. I was going through my old journals at the time, and writing became a creative project, something I was doing simply because I enjoyed it. Eventually, those reflections became a nonfiction manuscript I called Soft Power. I had no intention of publishing it. I was just having fun.
Then my husband challenged me to try writing fiction. My first thought was that I couldn't. I didn't know how to create a plot or invent characters. But the challenge made me curious about the story I was telling myself about what I could and couldn't do. So I tried. I didn't begin with a plot or fully formed characters. I followed what appeared, one curiosity at a time. Eventually, a woman named Solenne opened her eyes inside a mysterious house, and The Map Maker began.
Beyond the Page
When I’m not writing, I’m usually still noticing. I love my garden and the way it refuses to follow my plans. I love mornings outside with coffee and my dog, usually on my lap while we watch for squirrels, birds, and, if we’re lucky, deer.
I love traveling, taking photographs, being near water, growing things, making things, and conversations that wander somewhere neither person expected.
I’m a wife and a mother. My children have grown up alongside my journals, and over the years I’ve passed journals back and forth with them too.
My life isn’t separate from my writing. It’s where the writing comes from. The ordinary moments. The questions. The things that make me stop and wonder why they caught my attention.
I’ve learned to trust those moments. Sometimes they become an essay. Sometimes they become a story. And sometimes, apparently, they become a novel.
I seem to find my stories the same way I find most things in my life.
I notice something. I get curious. And I follow it to see where it leads.