The view from my home office window, VA

In Virginia, it is decidedly colder than it is in Doha. In fact, it felt like a bit of a cold plunge when I got off the plane to find that the weather called for a light sweater. The smells of greenery and lingering morning mist were like a muscle memory—ancient and immediate, as if the earth itself were whispering secrets I’d forgotten I knew. The scenery, while intimately familiar, remained at a distance. It was as if I was looking at a photo album, each vista separated by the thin membrane of time and transformation.

There’s something alchemical about stepping between worlds. The Virginia air carries ghosts of all my former selves: the young mother who scrubbed the red clay mud from her children’s clothes, the writer who found her voice in these rolling hills, the woman who believed home was a fixed point rather than a constellation of possibilities. Now, returning from the desert, I feel like an archaeologist of my own life, carefully brushing dust from artifacts of memory.

It is a bit strange to feel the call of two homes at the same time. Doha most certainly feels like home when I’m there—the way the sun scalds the earth with theatrical, unrelenting force, the rhythm of a life rebuilt from scratch, the exhilarating vertigo of becoming someone new in middle age. I miss my older children with the persistent ache of phantom limbs, but I have great affection for my new routine and the friends I’m making. Each morning there feels like stepping into a story I’m still writing, where the protagonist is both familiar and mysteriously transformed.

Me on my balcony in Doha

The transition to Virginia for the summer, as I prepare our house for renters and launch our youngest at college, feels a bit like time-travel. Not the clean, Hollywood version where you simply arrive in another era, but the messy, quantum kind where past and present exist simultaneously, overlapping like double-exposed photographs. The woman who boards the plane in Doha is not quite the same as the one who unlocks the Virginia door, and yet they share the same hands, the same wandering heart.

And still, within hours, I find myself falling right back into life here. The body remembers what the mind questions. My fingers knew exactly which drawer held the good knives; my feet traced familiar paths through rooms that seemed both smaller and larger than memory had preserved them. The alien vintage clothing store smell that had taken over our house began to give way as my daughter and I cooked in our kitchen, put away our clothes, and gave the place a deep clean. We were performing a ritual of reclamation, casting spells of domesticity to call the house back to itself.

There’s magic in the mundane work of homecoming. Each opened window was an invitation for the Virginia air to remember us. Each meal prepared was a conversation with the kitchen’s accumulated wisdom. My daughter and I moved from room to room, not just cleaning, but coaxing the house back to life. We were archaeologists and architects at once, excavating the past while constructing the present.

My girl in our pantry

As I settled back into life—blending my new role as an empty nester and expat with my old one as a rural Virginia writer and hands-on mother—I realized how much my fiction has always reflected my real-life experiences. But the mirror analogy doesn’t quite capture it. It’s more like a prism, refracting my life into different angles of meaning, each genre I write in offering its own way of seeing.

When I’m struggling with my family’s complicated history, I turn to writing Cold War thrillers. The past becomes a landscape of shadows and secrets, where every conversation might be coded, every silence corpulent with unspoken truths. The genre gives shape to shapeless anxiety, transforms the bewildering complexity of inheritance into something that can be solved, or at least survived. In these stories, I am both the spy and the double agent: the one who keeps secrets and the one who seeks to expose them.

As I ponder my marriage and children, I lean towards the epic and romantic. Love becomes a quest across impossible distances; relationships transform into mythic journeys where ordinary people discover they possess extraordinary powers. In these tales, every misunderstanding is a dragon to be slayed, every reconciliation a kingdom restored. The genre allows me to honor the genuine heroism required for lasting love, the way couples must repeatedly choose each other across decades of change.

And as I look back on my twenty years in rural Virginia, I find myself reimagining the Southern Gothic, local folklore, even elements of horror. The familiar landscape becomes haunted ground, where the past refuses to stay buried and family secrets grow like kudzu—beautiful, but suffocating. Spanish moss transforms into the hair of sleeping witches, and every old house holds the memory of all who lived and died within its walls. Horror becomes a way of acknowledging that home can be both sanctuary and trap, that the places we love most deeply are also the places that know all our weaknesses.

Each genre is a love letter to experience and evolution, re-envisioned as time-travel and sorcery. Writing becomes my way of honoring the mystery of transformation—how we can be one person in Doha and another in Virginia, how we can carry multiple homes in our hearts without being divided, how we can change completely while remaining essentially ourselves.

Perhaps this is what it means to be a writer living between worlds: to recognize that every story is really about the impossible magic of being human, the way we somehow manage to be both constant and ever-changing, both rooted and rootless, both homesick and home-coming, all at once. In the end, all our genres are just different ways of saying the same thing: that life is far more mysterious and wonderful than we ever dare to imagine, and that the greatest adventure is simply learning to see our own existence with the wonder it deserves.

My husband in our VA kitchen