As a college teacher, I’ve long been fascinated by the theater and society of the Elizabethan era, and in particular its complicated gender roles on stage and off. I’ve explored those themes in earlier novels, The Secret Player and Dark Venus, and the current novel Bedtrick takes them into more complex territory.

Born in Los Angeles, Califoria and living in Santa Barbara since I came to UCSB as a freshman, I’ve spent a great deal of time in England, watching the construction of the new Globe, the restoration of the Rose theatre ruins from Shakespeare’s London, researching at the British Library and Cambridge University Library, and best of all, visiting historical sites and attending plays.

Productions of As You Like It inspired my gender-bending take on performances in Shakespeare’s day. Women weren’t allowed to perform on stage, but what if one convincingly passed for male in order to be a stage player? In As You Like It, that would have meant a girl played a boy who played Rosalind, who for most of the play is disguised as the shepherd Ganymede.

Enter the historical actor, Alexander Cooke, listed in Shakespeare’s folio of 1623 as a player in his company. The eighteenth-century critic Edmond Malone credited Cooke with creating Shakespeare’s principal female roles, and in Andrew Gurr and Jonathan Bate’s critical studies, I discovered that Cooke was known as Sander. The fiction I’d been playing with now had its protagonist.

My own amateur theatrical experience contributed to my backstage view: I’ve played Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Corin the shepherd in As you Like It (as a woman), and the widow in The Taming of the Shrew. As a sabbatical project, I co-directed and stage managed a faculty production of As You Like It with Jim Edmondson of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

My short stories and essays have appeared in Blood and Roses, Library Book, Splickety Spark, and Greek Myths Revisited. Plays include Dearly Begotten, a spin off from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and Bedtrick, based on the novel, as well as Queeen Undaunted: Margaret of Anjou, Qualities of Mercy, Tales of Woo and Woe, and From Eve’s Fair Hand for DramaDogs of Santa Barbara.

I have three children, none of them stage actors, and continue to teach literary seminars in the OLLI extended learning program.