Coming About : A Family Passage at Sea - Softcover

o "... filled with amusing insight, turmoil and sensitivity." Doris Colgate, National Woman's Sailing Organization

o First published by Ballantine Books, 1998 ISBN 0-345-40663-X

Hitchcock grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and attended the University of Michigan, earning an Honors B.A. and an M.A. in English in four and half years. She worked in New York for two years thereafter, as an editorial assistant at Harper & Row and as an editor for a children's book and toy packager. In that job, she served as editor and ghost writer for Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. She blindly followed a boyfriend when he gained admission to the University of Virginia, and yet perhaps it was fate. Although she and that beau have long since parted, she still lives in the Blue Ridge countryside outside Charlottesville.

After writing a dissertation about the religious psychology implicit in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and earning a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Virginia in 1978, Hitchcock recognized that writing for the general public interested her more. Since then, she has earned a living writing, editing, and teaching. She has published five non-fiction books and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles on food, country lifestyles, and nature. She contributes a column of personal meditative essays, called "Letters from Home," to Albemarle, a magazine published in Charlottesville.

Two of her books, Gather Ye Wild Things: A Forager's Year (Harper & Row, 1980; University Press of Virginia, 1995) and Wildflowers on the Windowsill: Growing Wild Plants Indoors (Crown Publishers, 1984), secured her a reputation as an expert in the field of gathering useful wild plants. For four years, Hitchcock and two other artists published a Calendar of Wild Things. She has been invited to speak at many nature centers and public gardens, discussing the many edible and useful plants ordinarily considered weeds. She comments on edible wild plants monthly on WINA's "Charlottesville Live," a morning talk show.

Her interest in sailing has developed more recently, and in that time she has written and published several articles on the subject, including a short piece in Sail on doing laundry in the Caribbean and several articles in Cruising World about friends she has made while cruising. The promise of continued family cruises, with which Hitchcock concluded her book Coming About, has come true: she and her family have sailed twice since then, once to the Bahamas and once to the Northwest Caribbean, including Belize and Guatemala.

The thread that weaves through Hitchcock's writing about plants, food, nature, and sailing is her continuing search for a more wholesome life, in tune with the elements and the human spirit. She delights in finding meaning in simple moments and turns of events that others might simply overlook. Writing is a way to find -- perhaps even create -- meaning, she believes, and she tries to practice that belief in every piece she writes.