Pat was born in Quincy, Illinois, and until her twenties, lived in small rural towns in the Prairie State.
She attended Quincy University and received a Bachelor’s Degree in English. Unfortunately, when she tried to find a job as an English teacher, she discovered that everyone knew how to speak English already, a joke that kept her spirits up when she was looking for a job post-graduation.
She moved to the Pacific Northwest in the early seventies and began a career in the printing and paper world.
No matter where she’s lived or how she’s been employed, she has always written: Gritty newspaper articles in a neighborhood paper that she created, printed by hand, and then forced her sisters to sell door-to-door; plays performed for awed and intimidated neighborhood children; mystery novels released in chapters for the grade school paper; skits, poems, columns, obituaries, ad copy . . . you name it, she’s written it.