Ever since turning 40 a few years ago, Mary has been trying to become harder to introduce, and, at 66, she finds she’s been succeeding. Her conventional resume includes almost forty years of practicing law, first with Sidley & Austin and then with Winston & Strawn, two of the largest firms in Chicago. She was a partner at both in the advertising, trademark, copyright, entertainment and sports law areas, and retired in 2015, giving her more time to write, do community service and pursue hobbies such as golf, sailing, tennis and bridge. Her last three novels have all been national finalists for the #ForewordINDIES Book of the Year Award in General Fiction sponsored by Foreword Reviews.
Mary was raised in Crystal Lake, Illinois, then a small town forty five miles from Chicago. Her mother was a librarian and her father a PhD in chemical engineering, and that should explain everything. She has one sister, Donna C. Steele, born eleven months and two weeks after her, who skipped first grade so that the “Hutchings girls” were very much like twins—Donna the creative one (the Founder and Artistic Director of Steel Beam Theatre, St. Charles, IL) and Mary the logical one, and that should explain the rest of it!
She attended Prospect High School in Mt. Prospect, Illinois, where she loved being editor-in-chief of the school newspaper and on the speech events team, but was happy to graduate and move on to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She is “ever true to Brown” and grateful for lifelong friends she met there, as well as the intellectual encouragement she received from an inspirational faculty. She received both her bachelors (in public policymaking, an interdisciplinary program) and her masters (in economics) in four years, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1973. She then entered Yale Law School (having just missed the Clintons), where she won second prize in the Moot Court of Appeals competition–(“My husband doesn’t really believe in women in law,” one of the judge’s wives told her afterwards)–and chaired the Moot Court Board in her last year. She joined Sidley & Austin in 1976 and was elected to partner in 1983. Winston & Strawn recruited her in 1989 to help start their intellectual property department. She has been named Best Advertising Lawyer in Chicago twice.
Mary married William R. Reed, an internist, in 1982. They just celebrated thirty-four wonderful years together. It’s his fault she’s now a writer. In 1992, Mary took a leave of absence from law to sail from Norfolk, Va. to St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. with Bill in a 32 foot boat. (See Mary’s book, Captain Aunt), which took 22 days and nights. After three storms at sea and a few weeks of recovery at anchor in the Caribbean, Mary resigned her partnership in order to reduce her workload and refocus some of her energy on writing. She began to write every day and to study with Enid Powell in Chicago and Fred Shafer in Evanston. She has attended numerous writing conferences around the country, including Breadloaf (Middlebury, Vermont), Tin House (Portland, Oregon) and Words and Music (New Orleans). She continues to study with Shafer and with Elaine Loeser.
Mary and Bill have a new, smaller sailboat, If, still ocean-worthy, which they occasionally cruise up Lake Michigan and which they hope to take to salt water some time soon.
Mary also believes in community service, and for many years has served on the boards of various nonprofit organizations, including American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago, Off the Street Club, the Chicago Bar Foundation, LAF (the largest provider of free civil legal services to the needy of Cook County) and Steel Beam Theatre. In 2014, she received LAF's Champion for Justice Award. . She continues to serve on the board of her longest-standing service involvement, Lawyers for the Creative Arts. Through Ampersand's Good Reading for a Cause program Mary donates 10% of her proceeds from the sale of her books to The Night Ministry, LAF and LCA.
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