I’m Alison Krupnick, a former world traveling diplomat turned minivan-driving mom and writer, now at mid-life. I live in Seattle with my husband Jeff and two daughters.

I wrote my first essay, The Age of Innocence, shortly after 9/11, and kept writing essays, mostly about motherhood and things that affected me and my family – the death of a friend who was also a mother, the illness of my toddler daughter’s best pal, the challenges of re-learning to make friends at this new stage of life and my culinary flights of fancy, which enabled me to travel around the world without leaving my kitchen.  I was fortunate enough to publish some of these and so I kept writing, telling stories about the exhilaration of leaving my small town and discovering the world, only to be anchored in a small community once I became a mother.

The result was Ruminations from the Minivan:  musings from a world grown large, then small, much of which was written in stolen moments alone in my minivan, whenever I was at a stop light.  The manuscript won a prize at the Pacific Northwest Writers Association conference and even attracted the attention of a couple of literary agents.  And that’s as far as it went for a number of years, though I’m happy to report that the book was  published on January 1, 2013.

It the meantime, I got older, my kids got older, essays made way for blogs, and everyone seemed to be writing about food.  I got to experience the joy of travel again, sharing my experiences with my family. Though I branched out into corporate writing and magazine features, I still wanted to write about personal things.  I did so sporadically in a previous incarnation of this blog and was fortunate to be a regular contributor to Seattle magazine’s Balancing Act blog.

In the past few years, I’ve written about public education, aging, caring for and eventually losing a parent, watching my kids take the first tentative steps towards adulthood, returning full-time to the work force and baking bread.  These are things that affect all of us, no matter where in the world we are.

Thanks for visiting this site.  I hope my stories resonate with you.