Peggy Payne

Travel writer and TV reporter turned novelist Peggy Payne is author of three novels. Her first, Revelation, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice with screen rights sold to Synergy Films. Sister India became a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her most recent, Cobalt Blue, won an IPPY for Visionary Fiction. Her writing has come to range over every sort of spirituality and its expression in the physical world, particularly through sexuality. She has published in magazines including More, Cosmopolitan, Travel & Leisure, Ms. magazine, Family Circle, Coastal Living, Publishers Weekly, among others, and in most of the major American newspapers. She has received grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is also a winner of the Sherwood Anderson Award.  She works with other writers, providing manuscript feedback.  Her blog, Emails To My Therapist, is her own unfolding personal story.

Ten Things I Can’t Do Without

1. The writing group led by Laurel Goldman that I’ve been part of for thirty-four years
2. My sunny little office in Carrie Knowles’s Free Range Studio in downtown Raleigh
3. Iced tea and other sweets
4. My ragged garden
5. My husband, Bob Dick, a psychologist who specializes in clinical hypnosis
6. Our home in the woods
7. The ocean
8. Reading serious fiction and trashy magazines
9. My free-floating avoidance of scheduling
10. My sixty-eight years’ worth of beloved friends and family