In the summer of 1977, an artist working with her husband to preserve a dilapidated sculpture park in northern Wisconsin contends with forces that threaten the project and her marriage.

My work in progress, Dreams of Stone and Glass, began as a coming-of-age tale inspired in part by my own memories of the 1970s. I set the story of a seventeen-year-old’s summer in a place I’d once visited, Fred Smith’s Wisconsin Concrete Park. Fred Smith was a lumberjack and farmer who began building statues on his property late in life. I added a second point-of-view character based on the experiences of an artist and her husband who were involved in preserving the Park. Finally, I added a third narrative element, a series of vignettes featuring Fred Smith’s wife Alta. Each of these changes to the storyline strengthened the warp threads of historical fact that support the colorful weft of the fiction.