About
Beverly Knettell, a storyteller with a passion for the classics, can vividly remember her father’s exhaustive book collection. She was twelve when she first discovered the woodcut engravings of the ferocious dogs with their gnarling teeth in Wuthering Heights that caused her to quickly shut the book and the young women walking in formation on the cover of Jane Eyre, that eerily foreshadowed the red-cloaked images of The Handmaid’s Tale. Recalling her first introduction to Shakespeare in her early teens, she was mesmerized by the pageantry, the language, and the plots twists—which are now woven into her narratives.
Her home is in Newburyport, Massachusetts. When she’s not writing, reading or gardening, she enjoys weekend visits from her three grandchildren who have wall-papered her kitchen with their artwork while littering her floors with their Legos and magic markers. But don’t tell anyone about her secret admiration for Miss Piggy and how her indomitable spirit is at the heart of all her endeavors.
Her home is in Newburyport, Massachusetts. When she’s not writing, reading or gardening, she enjoys weekend visits from her three grandchildren who have wall-papered her kitchen with their artwork while littering her floors with their Legos and magic markers. But don’t tell anyone about her secret admiration for Miss Piggy and how her indomitable spirit is at the heart of all her endeavors.
Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.
— TWELFTH NIGHT, ACT 2 SCENE 5, LINES 139-41; MALVOLIO
— TWELFTH NIGHT, ACT 2 SCENE 5, LINES 139-41; MALVOLIO
Although I’ve spent the last twenty-odd years as a communications writer, I started my career in traditional publishing (Addison Wesley Longman). In my early parenting days as a single mom, I also wrote weekly food columns and monthly restaurant reviews in my spare time, to keep my head in the game. From traditional publishing, I migrated to software publishing and then to content development and global corporate communications in the high-tech industry. In 2012, I lost my daughter Kendra to a sudden illness. Since that tragedy, I began sharing in the care of her 4-month old son Ewan (that continues to this day) as I balanced consulting work with my late-night and early morning writing. For the last five years, I wrote highly technical end-user documentation for cardiology stress-testing systems. Although a far cry from fiction writing, the varied career assignments provided the appropriate discipline to research and write complex, detailed narratives. But it is my love of storytelling and my fondness for the classics in English Literature that keep me glued to the imaginary world I’ve created in the confines of my flash drives.