About

Michelle Elvy is a writer and manuscript assessor living on a sailboat with her husband and two daughters for more than twelve years. Her professional lives have included teacher, historian, translator, editor and chief wrangler at a software consulting company. She has published stories about children, food, faraway places, motorcycling, dreaming big and the kindness of strangers. Long before she set sail across the Pacific (before she sold everything she owned, before she became intimately acquainted with Alaskan fjords, Mexican chilis, Polynesian canoe racing and Fijian headlice), she was a PhD candidate at Brown University, a Fulbright Scholar and a Watson Fellow.

She believes that a person is an outcome derived from a sum of experiences, events and stories, all arranged seemingly willy-nilly yet producing precisely and only one result.

“I’m so hungry.”
“We’ll have dinner soon.”

Michelle is energetically and enthusiastically hopeful about just about everything.

“What sounds do rabbits really make?”
“Squeaky-squeak.”

But she’s also (just as energetically) cynical and skeptical about everything else.

“I know those cartoon rabbits don’t really talk; it’s the people in the background making them talk.”
“Right.”
“It’s just like Santa Claus. That’s why you don’t eat so many cookies at Christmas – because you have to eat the ones we put out for Santa.”
No Comment. Grin.

To encapsulate oneself with one particular set of adjectives, to consign an individual to the black-and-white here-and-now, to convey a never-morphing, never-backsliding, never-advancing, never-evolving me – well, that hardly tells the whole story.

To describe a person as a lover of mangos, ginger and Milka but a non-lover of lima beans, raisins and jelly, to write that Michelle is at once a happy mother, keen teacher, earnest daughter and faraway friend would tell part of the equation. To say she’s a fan of profanity and firm believer in chance would be an understatement. To say she advocates a less-is-more approach to life but lives as fully as she ever has would approach the truth about who she really is. To say she worries about living in a nuclear age and the nature of 21st century war and climate change and the devolving political discourse in her birthcountry, but to admit that she does it while traipsing around sandy beaches in jandals, would also be the truth.

To say that this website is as much about the evolving person as it is about the evolving stories is just about right.

Michelle lives in New Zealand, where she sails, edits and writes.