Up Beaver Creek

Sue Fagalde Lick spent many years as a newspaper reporter, photographer and editor before retiring to become a full-time writer and musician. She has published books about Portuguese Americans, childlessness and life on the Oregon coast. A graduate of the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, she has taught writing at Oregon Coast and Chemeketa community colleges and at conferences and workshops across the U.S. On weekends, she puts on her music hat to sing and play piano and guitar at St. Anthony's Church in Waldport, Oregon and performs wherever people are willing to listen. She lives with her dog Annie in South Beach, which, like everyplace she has ever lived, is in the flight path of the local airport.

PD, 42, recently widowed and childless, has driven west from Missoula, Montana to start a new life in Newport on the Oregon coast. She has a new look, slim and fit from hours at the gym, a new spiky red hairdo, and a new take-no-shit attitude. She is determined to leave behind the dumpy housewife-turned-pitiful-widow known as Cissy, who worked at the hospital and only sang in the church choir. No more dreaming about becoming a professional musician. Her house rented, her stuff in storage, she's going to do it. And if anyone asks, she's 35.She finds herself housesitting a cabin up Beaver Creek Road with two cats and a garden full of sculptures made from glass bottles and junk. She's making new friends and making progress with her music. But things start going wrong at the cabin, and the landlord seems to have disappeared. Her first music gig is a disaster. And then the tsunami comes. Will PD slink back to Montana pitiful and penniless? Not if she can help it.This is a light-hearted, feel good story full of characters you can't help but love, bonding together to survive beside the beautiful but potentially deadly Pacific ocean.