On Dec. 1st, 1941 Maren was born, first child of missionary parents. One week later, bombs began to fall around their home in the Philippine Islands.

She spent the next three weeks under the kitchen table, sheltered in her Mother’s arms and then became one of the youngest prisoners of war in the Pacific Theater. Maren's earliest memories are of life behind barbed wire. They were released three-and-a-half years later, and then her parents took Maren on a tour of Midwestern parsonages that lasted throughout her childhood.

In her teens she learned what it really meant to be an American, when her parents moved her and her five younger brothers and sisters to Europe for a year and a half. After graduating with a B.A. in Theater Arts from the University of Minnesota, she moved to Seattle and became an official storyteller for the King County Libraries. In the years that followed, her career took her to Connecticut and back to Minnesota, as she continued to tell stories, teach school, and work in the theater, while raising her own family.

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