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"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet, 1903.

Womanflight: An experience, an attempt, even a failed attempt in a woman's life that prepares her for future challenges. It is living out what Rainer Maria Rilke once referred to as "loving the questions themselves. . . At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

Although a book usually begins with vague outlines and time-resistant dreams, there is a building process that pulls together pieces buried in the subconscious. Over months, then years, this happened to me. I've been writing, mostly novel writing, almost thirty years. Interestingly, there is a persistent thread of aviation that happens to run through my life and my writing, which has occurred again recently in completion of a book-length project. In considering the past, Quick Fall of Light, a novel of speculative fiction published over a decade ago, the crash of a single-engine plane in the Olympic Rain Forest begins the story of a bird flu pandemic. This work also ends in a specific flight trauma. Bookended by flight. That is my story.

Flight prepared me for life and for death, even this part of metastasizing breast cancer. Flying taught me patience, resilience, the element of surprise, and that the landing you walk away from is always your best, words I still live by. In the end, I am a product of womanflight. It has become more of me than I could have ever foreseen.