Hello!

I am a Timberwolf Pup. The daughter of a highly decorated World War II combat sergeant and a veteran of a war fought at home. Trained to be successful, secretive, and loyal, I earned a BA in English Literature at UC Berkeley, where my love of writing and reading began.

Since then, I’ve spent lots of time in writing groups, workshops, and coaching college-bound students. I’m a workshop facilitator with Write Around Portland and a teacher at Blackbird Studio for Writers. And I’ve witnessed the transformational power of storytelling in many lives, including my own. But we need safe places to be heard and felt so that we can dig down and unearth our deeper truths, which is why I started teaching. This is the type of storytelling that keeps me hooked on writing.

I spent over twenty years in the publishing industry, marketing and selling other people's beautiful books, and now I have one of my own. My debut memoir, Little Avalanches (Regalo Press March 2024), winner of the Rubery Book Award for 2024 Nonfiction Book of the Year and Finalist for The Oregon Book Award, is available in bookstores. I’ve made Portland, Oregon, my home. It’s where I write and teach and play outside.

“We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.”
– Russell Baker

Hello!

Other writing

Kitchen Table Conversations

The Whirlpool Duet

Why My Daughter’s Tattoo Actually Left a Mark on Me — What I learned about motherhood from a painful past

Urban Legend

Slayed and Saved

Mending Family Trauma

“We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.”

– Russell Baker