About Lisa

Who are we if we don’t know where we came from?

That is the question that triggered my debut novel, A Day of Small Beginnings (Little, Brown & Co, 2006). I thought I was going to write a story about a man’s return to his father’s hometown in Poland but like many novels, it had other ideas…. After a trip to my Polish in-laws hometown of Zwolen, it acquired a ghost from the Jewish cemetery. Since the town no longer had any Jews, it let me know I had to include Rafael Bergson, a fictional last remaining Jew, who had an awful lot of secrets for my characters to unravel.

Right now, I’m writing a novel set among the Indian mounds at Cahokia, just east of St. Louis. It’s a story about their threatened destruction in the rush to construct the interstates in the 1950’s. It’s also about the blacklist, and yes love – a triangle that will change the course of three lives long after they leave this mysterious place.

The Write Stop is where I come when I’m not working on that novel. It’s where I  write about things that don’t fit there but which I find interesting. I hope they will interest you too.