SLF Grants
Deborah Roggie - Autobiographical Note:
I grew up in suburbia, and my best times were either spent with a book, roaming the woods behind our house, building towns in the dirt with my Matchbox cars, or creating epic adventures for my dolls. When I was ten, reading both The Hobbit and Harriet the Spy sealed my fate. I began to write.
However, it's been road with many detours. Along the way I've waitressed, cleaned houses, worked in retail, painted interiors, and weeded exteriors. I graduated from Rutgers University in 1978 with a degree in history and have lived and worked in New Jersey ever since as a technical writer, trainer, and technical specialist in the insurance and telecommunications industries.
I majored in history because I've always loved finding the stories buried in old texts and am fascinated by the past. How differently our predecessors saw their world--how time distorts how we remember our own pasts--and how even today we use the timeless world of fairy tales to make sense of our lives. At least, that is how I make sense of things. In my own stories, snakes speak and mountains open, bears turn into women, and love potions work all too well.
In my writing I explore the intertwined threads of memory and personality, themes that turn up in many of my short stories, including the published stories, "The Enchanted Trousseau" and "Swansdown," and in my unpublished novel, The Puzzle Tree.
I also examine the process of recovering one's voice in "The Mushroom Duchess," and the dangers of false starts, detours, and transformations, in The Puzzle Tree--all subjects that hit close to home.
My stories have been published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Realms of Fantasy, and Eidolon, and anthologized in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
My new novel (in progress and as yet untitled), is set in New Jersey in the first decade of the twentieth century. A family with hidden ties to Faerie must maintain a façade of respectability despite the desperate longings and secret adventures of various family members. But when Julia, the disobedient middle daughter who has been surreptitiously exploring the hidden realm, inadvertently contributes to the weakening of boundaries between worlds, she must find a way to keep them apart or risk losing everything—on both sides of the border—that she loves.
