I’m a born-again optimist with a wickedly dark sense of humor who grew up in Carthage, South Dakota, a teeny tiny town with gravel roads and no traffic lights. I now live in Seattle, WA and I just finished my first book, a memoir (working title Backbone...or maybe Lust, Loss, & Laundry Day) about remembering how to stand up for myself after decades of codependence and the suicide of my son. 

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I was an English major in college but, too afraid of criticism and the possibility of ruining my precious GPA, I never took any creative writing courses. I ended up dropping out of school to be a stay-at-home mom and many years later, as I grappled with the suicide of my son, I tried painting and drawing to express my complex emotions. When my efforts produced work that I only reluctantly would have hung on the fridge if one of my four kids had proudly handed it to me on their first day of kindergarten, I was forced to write a poem. I was instantly hooked, and writing became an important part of my two-steps-forward, one-step-back healing journey. 

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When my poetry was featured in multiple issues of the local community college magazine, I was so surprised that you could have knocked me over with a feather. I even read some of my poems publicly, but when I quit drinking, I assumed my writing days were behind me. After all, Booze was my muse (hey, that rhymes and I wasn’t even trying!). Most nights, she would leave me half-legible notes scrawled on scraps of paper and bar napkins and over the next few days, I’d manage to turn one or two of those scribbles into something worthy of a title.

 

But it turned out that not letting my evenings dissolve into the bottom of a bottle and not waking up with a headache every morning actually had a positive impact on my productivity and, after the dust settled from another family tragedy (my ex-husband's suicide), I got remarried, finished a Bachelor of General Studies degree, became a certified holistic life coach, and wrote Backbone. 

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When I’m not haunting thrift stores or working a jigsaw puzzle at my dining room table (so exciting, right?), I can be found in the audience or behind the mic at local storytelling events or working on my next (currently untitled) memoir which explores identity, gender, and aging (pro tip: whatever you do, stay far away from magnifying mirrors!)