I have had this website for some time, and yet I have resisted writing blog posts. Why? I think I’ve struggled with the messaging that many writers receive about “branding” themselves. I feared making a mistake, somehow coming across wrong. Labeling myself into a corner.

But the biggest issue I worried about is this: I don’t want to be a brand. I’m a person, and I have many disparate interests. Sometimes my interests change! I find new things to obsess over. I don’t want to be the writer who specializes in just one specific thing. So, to free myself from worrying about all this, I decided I’ll just go ahead and declare right here that I’m a writer. I usually write for adults, though my current project is a YA novel. I love mystery and horror–Gothic above all else. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy humor, romance, cozies, and literary fiction. I do. I’m a sucker for poetic turns of phrase, for witty criticisms, for ingenious sentences.

Who else am I? I’m a parent who’s struggling, as many others are, with being the primary caretaker for a child during the global pandemic. I spend hours reading and researching methods for improving the lives of people living with ADHD. I am learning to meditate, and to be mindful, and to return to the present when my mind begins an anxiety-spiral about the future. Yoga is another practice that I am slowly coming back to, after months (years?) of neglect. And I am a teacher. I love teaching writing classes. I don’t claim to have any magical methods that will help students summon whole works of art in mere days. But there is nothing better than helping guide writers through a project by sharing practices that have helped me on my own writing journeys. The community and discussion and support in writing workshops is its own kind of magic, I suppose; a kind of ideas-coming-together-at-just-the-right-moment serendipity that I don’t often find anywhere else in life.

So, that’s who I am. At least for today. Welcome to my blog.