Gwen Florio grew up in a 250-year-old brick farmhouse on a wildlife refuge in Delaware, with a sweeping view across a mile of tidemarsh to the waters of the Delaware Bay. In addition to ponies, dogs and chickens, her childhood also included raising and releasing a number of wild animals, from raccoons and fawns to owls and hawks, and a skunk whose personality was even worse than his smell. Her parents banned television and instead filled the house with books.

She majored in English at the University of Delaware, largely as an excuse to continue reading as many books as possible, until her father urged her, in the interest of being able to someday support herself, to take a journalism course. With her first byline, she was hooked. A decades-long career followed, taking her around the United States and to more than a dozen countries, including several conflict zones, toting books to each place.

In the interest of finally writing books instead of reading them, she signed on with Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Writers’ Group and, later in Montana, the 406 Writers’ Workshop. Two manuscripts that serve as perfectly effective doorstops preceded her first published novel Montana (The Permanent Press, 2013).

About Montana – the state, that is. Florio finally rediscovered those long sight lines that she fell in love with back in Delaware, the nation’s second-smallest state, when she moved to Montana, the fourth-largest; the difference being that instead of tidemarsh bordered by bay, Montana features prairie edged by mountain and sky. It’s a fine trade. She’ll never again have the good fortune of living on a wildlife refuge, but her home in Missoula’s Rattlesnake neighborhood is the next best thing, backing up as it does to Mount Jumbo, with its wintering elk, and bears that wander from its slopes into her backyard the rest of the year.