In their work as librarians, Rick and Martha regularly wrote and performed plays at schools, reaching thousands of children. Rick studied playwriting at Chicago Dramatists and Victory Gardens Theatre, which sponsored a staged reading of his play Rise. 

On their honeymoon, they visited Wisconsin to see plays at American Players Theater and to tour Taliesin.  They saw The Winter's Tale--a devastating adultery play.  The extra reading they did about Frank Lloyd Wright highlighted the violent murder of his mistress at Taliesin.  The theme of southwest Wisconsin that season seemed to be marital strife and murder. Luckily a friend recommended a tour of Pendarvis, a historic rock cottage preserved by Bob Neal and Edgar Hellum in the Thirties.  The story of Bob and Edgar--two men whose unlikely partnership lasted thirty years and saved their hometown of Mineral Point--was just the kind of story they'd been looking for.

They live in Evanston, Illinois.