Marcy Alancraig’s writing arises from her love of the various landscapes of her native California and the people who have been shaped by them.  She first began hearing the voices of the natural word when she was a child.  At first dismissing those messages as pure imagination, she now takes them seriously, crafting her fiction from them.  Her work concerns the interaction between humans, their ancestors and plants and animals.

A Woman of Heart came into being after Marcy grew intrigued by a community of Jewish chicken ranchers who lived in the rural town of Petaluma, California during the 1920’s and 30’s.  Certain cadences and snippets of Yiddish conversation began to inhabit her dreams.  After two years of research and interviews with the ranchers’ descendants, their joys and conflicts found their way on to the page.  “Such a Business,” a chapter from an early draft of Heart, was published in Speaking for Ourselves, edited by Irene Zahava (Crossing Press). 

Other short stories and poems have been published in Red Wheelbarrow, Sisters Singing: Incantations, Blessings, Prayers, Art, Songs and Sacred Stories by Women (Wild Girl Publishers), Porter Gulch Review (2000, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011), Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, Korone, Shirrim, and Somebody’s Speaking My Language.  In addition, Marcy edited eight volumes of a yearly intergenerational anthology entitled Across the Generations (1982-89) and founded and co-directed the Women’s Voices Writing Workshop, a summer writer’s conference, at UC Santa Cruz (1977-86). 

Marcy is currently at work on two novels.  Listening to the Shadows tells the story of a Chinese fisherman living in Monterey, California in the 1880’s.  Born with the ability to hear the voices of plants and animals, Leong Ah Dak renounces his gift during a difficult voyage to America.  But after going blind in his forties, Ah Dak must learn to “listen” again to save his granddaughter from a peril only he can recognize and cure.

Another novel-in-progress, The Whale Singer, is the first in a trilogy about a woman born to be a bridge between gray whales and humans.  At sixteen, Lena MacDonald finds herself seeing whales in the most inappropriate places – breaching through the Safeway parking lot, for instance, or spouting over the scuffed linoleum hallways of her high school.  The daughter of two whale researchers who died while studying these animals, at first Lena is worried that she’s going crazy.  But instead, she finds herself undergoing “The Great Dive,” a gray whale coming-of-age ritual where she will discover her purpose in life and learn how she can help the creatures she loves.  Based on latest science about cetaceans, portions of the novel are written from a whale’s point of view.

Marcy lives amid the redwood trees near Santa Cruz, California where she writes and teaches as a full-time English professor at Cabrillo College.  In 2010, she won the Hayward Award for Excellence in Education, a state-wide recognition of her long-standing commitment to students and innovative teaching.  When she’s not at her desk or in a classroom, you can find her watching for whales from Point Lobos State Reserve, hiking the local forests or backpacking through the alpine country of the Sierra Nevada.