Marianne M. Porter

Writer and Photographer

About Marianne

Marianne Porter drove west from her home in New Jersey during summer 1980 and landed in Truckee, California, amid the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada. For the first six years, she worked at Northstar-at-Tahoe ski resort where she met many lifelong friends, including her husband of 37 years. She wrote freelance articles for local news publications, The Sierra Sun and Moonshine Ink, and was a copywriter for ad agency clients in the Tahoe Basin. Her personal essays have published online at Manifest Station/On Being Human, Freeflow Institute, Entropy/Woven, most recently in The Sacramento Bee newspaper. Her poems appear in Clover: A Literary Rag, and Pure Slush.

In 2014, Marianne earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada College, now the University of Nevada, Lake Tahoe. Her coming-of-age travel memoir titled “Adrift Across Europe” will publish in 2025.

Photo by: Kelsey Joy Photography

“Almost aIl the people who've had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn't but have met them. It's as if they were waiting there to be called upon when I needed them.”

Larry Darrell, The Razor’s Edge

by W. Somerset Maugham

In addition to writing, you can find Marianne mountain biking, cross country skiing, kayaking, rafting, and exploring the Western US with her husband Jim, yellow lab Willow, and lifelong Tahoe friends.

Rim camping at Utah's "Little Grand Canyon"

Cross-country skiing, Tahoe Donner, Truckee, CA

Ancient Pueblo ruins, near Bears Ears National Monument, Utah