A Love Like No Other

Nancy Taylor Robson is one of the first women in the country to earn a US Coast Guard license to run coastal tugboats. She came to the water naturally. She grew up sailing and building boats with her father on the Chesapeake Bay. Like Abigail Adams, her family believed that women were smart and capable, and could and should be able to take care of whatever needs to be done. She comes from a family of readers and had always been one herself. She began writing little booklets in childhood, and read voraciously from her family's broad library. While frugality was a watchword in her childhood home, there was always plenty for books. She worked as a housepainter, desk clerk and yacht maintenance person while in college, moved to England for a year and worked as a charwoom, housepainter, wallpaper hanger and babysitter. After returning to the States, she earned a degree in history from University of Maryland, then, instead of going to law school, she married and went to work alongside her husband as cook/deckhand on an 85-foot tugboat built during WWII. She earned her US Coast Guard license to while running tugs and barges the length of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, including one two-month stretch working on a supply boat in the Gulf of Mexico's Campeche oil fields from which they were chased out at gunpoint into the teeth of a gale. Her first book, Woman in The Wheelhouse (Tidewater Publishers) is a memoir of the six years she worked at sea until 8 months pregnant with her first child.Her second book, Course of the Waterman (River City Publishing), the novel of a young Eastern Shore waterman, won the Fred Bonnie award in 2003 and a bronze award from ForeWord for Novel of The Year in 2004. Her third book, second novel, A Love Like No Other: Abigail and John Adams, A Modern Love Story, (Head to Wind Publishing) takes readers into the lives of the new nation's strong-willed second First Lady and her stubborn, irascible, often-absent and adored husband. Her fourth book, OK Now What? A Caregiver's Guide to What Matters (Head to Wind Publishing) was written in collaboration with Sue Collins, RN, and longtime hospice nurse.In addition to the books, Robson has been a freelance writer for many years. She has written personal essays, features, maritime reporting and analysis, travel, garden and more for such places as The Washington Post, Yachting, House Beautiful, The Baltimore Sun, the Christian Science Monitor, Southern Living, Sailing, Woodenboat and more. For three years, she was the senior editor of The Chestertown Spy, for which she also wrote weekly garden and food columns. She is also a University of Maryland Master Gardener, who grows and cans the family's fruits and vegetables and blogs occasionally for the university's Grow It Eat It blog. She writes, sails, races sailboats (occasionally), walks the husky, and cooks for family and friends.