I’m a literary novelist and short‑story writer drawn to quiet intensity, emotional nuance, and the small rituals that shape a life. After twenty‑nine years in education, I now write from my 1898 home in western Kentucky, where two opinionated cats supervise the work. My fiction explores relationships, memory, and the mythic undercurrents of ordinary days, and my stories have appeared in journals across five continents. I’m currently querying a new novel and continuing my project of publishing on every continent.
The Long Version
A therapist once told me, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t understand how you’ve survived all these years, held down jobs, interacted with so many people, and never been institutionalized.” Looking back, it’s a fair point.
I owe my survival partly to an overactive imagination — the same one that helped me rationalize my childhood into something tolerable and eventually pushed me toward writing. About 98% of what I write is trash. It’s like my photography: I take hundreds of pictures of my cats, and every now and then one is unexpectedly beautiful. A blind pig and an acorn situation.
People ask why I write. The truth is simple: to release the monsters from my head. They assume I write horror. I don’t, not usually, but there’s always a thread of darkness, morbidity, or fear running through the plot. The monsters insist on being heard.
I rather like this image that AI came up with for the monsters in my head.
I grew up in a small town in Tennessee and endured a miserable childhood, even by Gen X standards. I was a good student — sleep-deprived, frequently absent, but good — and somehow ended up with a double major and international semesters. After all that, I landed in education. Interesting karma for someone who slept through school.
My kindergarten graduation photo is the only graduation photo I have. You’ll have to believe me about the rest of the degrees. (I’m the one in the middle.)
I spent 29 years teaching in various high schools across several states. I loathed the work but loved the people. In those years I did what most people do: fell in love a few times, survived a disaster marriage, traveled, made friends, lost friends, and tried to figure out how to be a person.
Now I live in a 19th‑century house with a ghost or two, and I’m no longer teaching — a decision that increased my happiness exponentially. Quitting teaching and not having children are two things I did right. No regrets there.
Here’s the house I bought. No regrets, not even the ghosts.
These days I work a low‑stress state job, which feels like a fair trade for the decades I spent in classrooms. I’m not affiliated with any organized religion. I meditate daily, a habit left over from years of Buddhism. I was raised in extreme conservative Christianity, for which I’m grateful only because it showed me exactly how not to live.
Politically, I lean left. Physically, I try not to lean at all. I’m fascinated by castles, architecture, miniatures, pandas, polar bears, and I consider myself a connoisseur of tea. I live with two freeloading but adorable cats, Patty and Marie, and I obey them without question.
L to R, Patty and Marie, feline overlords.
Random trivia (for the brave who keep reading)
- I enjoyed the isolation of COVID. The disease, not so much.
- I don’t understand why wasps exist.
- I write poetry, admire it for five minutes, then delete it.
- Funerals, yes. Weddings, no.
- The Great British Baking Show is responsible for 90% of my baking.
- I’m trilingual and trying to add Italian, which mostly confuses the other languages.
- Feedback on my work is always welcome, even if it’s negative. Truly.