Echele’s mom taught her to read before she was five. One of her earliest memories is of the two of them sitting on a very 1970s couch, taking turns reading Jane Eyre while sunlight came through the window at exactly the right angle to make the dust visible in the air. Decades later, Echele gave that memory to Elise in Leaving the Swamp.
Although she always wanted to write creatively, Echele spent much of her adult life writing other things. Her career included more than twenty-five years of technical writing and outreach work supporting NASA programs.
She also spent years teaching in alternative education. For some of her students, the books they read in her classroom were the first novels they had ever finished. Watching them discover the pleasure of reading was one of the things she loved most about teaching.
Through all those years, Echele continued building stories of her own. Finishing them was another matter. She could construct an entire novel in her head and then become so consumed with perfecting the words that she rarely got beyond three pages. Eventually, she changed her process and learned to keep going.
Leaving the Swamp is her first published novel.
Place has always mattered to Echele. She spent the first years of her life in Moyock, North Carolina, near the Great Dismal Swamp, before growing up in Maryland. She loves the Chesapeake Bay, but North Carolina still pulls at her. She loves old houses and the sensory details that can make a place stay with us: foghorns, church bells, trains in the distance, storms, and night skies.
Family is at the center of Echele’s life. Love and grief have shaped her, and both inevitably make their way onto her pages. People she has loved have contributed a sentence, a gesture, a drawing, a joke, or a memory.
Echele is currently writing Frank, set in the Chesapeake Bay watershed of Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Frank is an American black vulture, and he is real. He appeared in the backyard after severe summer storms. She researched him, watched him, worried about him, and was prepared to help care for him if he couldn’t fly.
The house in Frank is real, too. Echele has been watching it for decades.
Away from the keyboard, she crochets and has a weakness for yarn. She is much happier looking at flowers than being responsible for keeping them alive. She follows true crime, loves James Taylor, considers flip-flops year-round footwear, and gets ridiculously excited about wildlife. She loves autumn mornings, the particular light that comes with them, and a cup of coffee.
She is also very much Gen X, including the peculiar experience of being old enough to know better while remaining reasonably certain she’s somewhere in her thirties.
Echele is writing because she finally decided she wanted to build a life around what she wants to do rather than spend the rest of it doing only what she has to do. She hopes readers will fall in love with the people she creates—enough to miss them when the story is over, and enough to want to spend time with them again.