Hello & Welcome
My stories and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, Chautauqua and Coastal Living among others, and received awards from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
My novel-in-progress was awarded an Elizabeth George Foundation grant and residency support from the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a Westerly Library & Wilcox Park artist residency. I hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University.
In addition to writing, I love working with people to help shape their stories and have created and led workshops independently, and for several literary centers as well as the Armed Services Arts Partnership.
I look forward to learning more about your work.
On Writing
I became a writer the first time I boarded an airplane.
I was ten-years-old and had jetted off with my grandfather to visit my cousins more than a thousand miles away. By the end of the trip I was spellbound at how captivatingly different New Orleans was from my hometown in upstate New York. Rainstorms left warm shallow pools in the streets deep enough to wade in. The dead were buried in marble boxes above the ground. Lizards, not squirrels, slinked across their backyard, and words sounded slow and slurred together, like “y’all.”
When my aunt called out one evening asking if we wanted “po-boys,” I turned to my cousin Donna and said, “Is your mom asking if we want to have dinner with some poor boys?” She fell back on her bed giggling. “It’s a big sandwich! Y’all call it a submarine I think.”
That trip changed the way I saw the world. I was hooked on how travel wakes up your senses and ignites that heady rush that comes from discovering something new. I scribbled my epiphanies in a little red notebook, along with: “sneakers=tennis shoes, even if you don’t play.”
Several more trips and a college degree in marketing and economics later, I was working on travel’s business side for Sonesta International Hotels in Boston, followed by a stint at Royal Caribbean. I continued to write throughout and discovered that bringing people and places to life on a page was as enticing as travel.
I immersed myself in writing workshops after a move to the Washington, DC area and have been a contributor for national magazines and newspapers for more than twenty years. My love for two industries was spurred on at a conference where Arthur Frommer waxed philosophic on seven important lessons travel teaches—7:
“Travel teaches humility. You become a quieter American as a result of travel…and, in my opinion, perhaps a more thoughtful one.”
I witnessed that mantra made manifest when I ran a 5k with barefoot Barbadians on a Cruise to Run, met fellow moms while distributing shoes in remote Peruvian villages on a Soles 4 Souls trip, and especially in Europe with my sons. They noticed similarities between countries and differences.
And I discovered the power travel has to teach when my ten-year-old son stood amid Roman ruins and remarked: “Wow, America is really young.”
For the last decade, I’ve had the opportunity to teach personal essay and travel writing workshops for people of all ages, from retirees to fellow teachers, scientists, attorneys, a “Lady Docs” group, members of the military and more, and have been honored to hear their stories.
Through this I’ve seen time and again what a portal writing can be to hear the quiet within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, often without full awareness, that is until you’ve written it on a page, and then realize the ways you might edit it, strengthen it, on the page, and off.
Those experiences inspired me to add more tools to my teaching and writing toolbox. Earlier this year, I completed Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s two-year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training program, certified by the Awareness Training Institute and University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.
Today, now back in New England, I incorporate those learnings into my work, whether helping others tell their stories or working on my own.
My co-worker, Molly, offers daily reminders to stay curious.
