Here’s a bit about me, what I do, and my road to becoming a writer.

What I do

I love helping emerging writers get published! I’ve taught personal narrative and publishing classes for the University of Washington, Seattle University, Hedgebrook, Hugo House and numerous colleges and organizations. I teach an author platform building in an online course with live and recorded classes called Platform Building 101 for Emerging Writers. A new section is now open. Not ready to take the course? You can sign up for the waiting list here.

I do developmental editing on memoir manuscripts and closer editing on personal essays and memoir book proposals. (Both my books sold on proposal and I’ve helped clients sell their books this way too). I especially love helping writers with structural edits of first drafts of memoirs. I find it satisfying like working a crossword. You can learn more about my editing and the success of some of my students and clients here.

My essays on parenting, feminism, books, and relationships have been published in the New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Establishment, Under the Sun, The Rumpus, New Mexico magazine, ParentMap, Brain, Child magazine, the Ask Me About my Divorce and Modern Love anthologies, and a number of other places. You can find a few essays of these here.

I’m the author of two books: How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed: A Memoir of Starting Over (Crown, 2008) and Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding her Voice (And a Guide to How You Can Too) (Simon & Schuster, 2013). You can find them here.

The Road to Writing

I knew I wanted to write when I was about eighteen, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever get there. In college I took creative writing classes and worked on the student newspaper the first few years, but then somehow drifted away from writing and ended up doing a Masters in English Literature. It seemed easier to study writing than to write, although I did have to write a lot of academic papers. But that never felt like my “real writing.” I knew my real writing—if I ever got around to doing it—was going to be about feelings and stuff like that. But I didn’t know where to begin. Or I did and I would begin, but then I ended up hating what I was writing after a few pages and would just stop.

After I finished my MA, I moved to Utah to be a professor at a community college, where I taught mostly developmental writing and study skills. In the grocery store I saw a poster for a writing class and took a little tab from it with a phone number and the name “Rose.” Rose lived in a trailer in the middle of the desert and there were five of us who sat crosslegged on her floor and drew prompts from a bowl and read our words to each other aloud. In the summers I started going to a writing retreat in the mountains near Cedar City, Utah. Mostly poets taught the classes and I loved them. The poet Ken Brewer taught me how to write a triptych there. After I wrote that first triptych, I knew that I was starting to do my “real writing” and that if I could keep writing triptychs, I would be able to keep writing, to keep telling the stories that mattered most to me. Near the end of my time in Utah, I took a weeklong class with Terry Tempest Williams who had us write on the question, “Where is home?” I used my triptychs and the writing I did for Terry for my application for the MFA in Creative Writing program at UW in Seattle.

I wanted to do the MFA because I knew if I wrote for two years, I would become a real writer and that if I didn’t do that, I might never get there. I was a mom by then and I could see how between parenting and teaching there was always going to be a lot of demands on my time and that it would be easy to keep putting writing on the back burner.

When I finished the MFA, I was worried that now that I was out of the program (and now I had two young kids), that I would stop writing, so I joined a writing group that met weekly and I started getting in the routine of submitting work to magazines and contests. Eventually I started getting publications. Brain, Child magazine was one of my first publications. I developed a relationship with the editors and started writing for them routinely. Then, I won first place in a literary magazine’s Creative Nonfiction contest and a scholar spot at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. My instructor there recommended my essay to the editor of the newly forming Modern Love column in the New York Times. The publication of that essay, “The Chicken’s in the Oven, My Husband’s Out the Door” led to the sale of my first book, How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed. Yahoo!

One of the best parts of teaching is watching my students find their “real writing” and their voices. I can see how much satisfaction they get from finally expressing something they’d long to express and it reminds me of my own journey. I also really love it when their work gets published and they have the experience of sharing their words with the world.