Lisa Bouchard learned to read at five. Her mother taped words to chairs, tables, and doors — nothing in the house was safe from being labelled. Reading became her favorite thing.

She didn’t go straight into writing, having been convinced she’d become the stereotypical starving artist. Choosing a safer path, she got a degree in chemistry and later went to grad school for physics. Then came a stretch of jobs that don’t obviously belong together: environmental engineer, barista, chemist, professional knitter, physics instructor, and homeschooling mother to her four children.

She started writing cozy paranormal mysteries during the pandemic, picking a New Hampshire setting she could research from her car without getting out. She likes writing women who are competent one moment and completely in over their heads the next — characters people recognize in themselves rather than admire from a distance.

Her desert island book is Douglas Adams’s The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, a fantasy mystery involving Norse gods, set in London.

She writes from her home in the Balkans, surrounded by friends, coffee shops, and bakeries.