I am a novelist, poet, playwright and free-lance writer with an M.A. in English/Creative Writing from Oregon State University. Besides being a writer, I've done summer stock; run a landscape design company; been up close and personal with gray whales, petting them off the coast of Baja California; dined with Vincent Price; taught risktaking seminars; owned a consulting business that took me all kinds of interesting places where my hard hat was required; learned to juggle; and hung out in jazz and blues establishments on both coasts whenever possible. I believe what author Louis Auchincloss wrote about a writer's life being his or her capital, and I've tried to gather as much of that capital as possible for my writing. 

My jazz novel, Listen, was published by Blue Finch Press in 2003 and my one-woman comedy drama, On Our Way to Somewhere, four vignettes of women and their lives, was published in 2001.  Both are available at Whidbey Island bookstores; at Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine; and through online book sellers.  I'm currently working on two novels and a nonfiction handbook for writers, Writing Unplugged, which will be available in late 2009. 

In 1995, I was a Fellow at the Fishtrap Writers Conference in the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon and in 1998, I received the Dibner Fellowship for Fiction awarded by the Maine Community Foundation. That same year I was named to the Maine Artists Roster.  

I inaugurated my writing workshops in Portland, Maine and brought my Good Golly Miss Molly School of Creative Writing, Blues and Jazz Appreciation to Bellevue, Washington in 2000 and later to Portland, Oregon and Spokane, Washington. In 2008, the Good Golly Miss Molly School became part of the Skylark Writing Studio on Whidbey Island, and the melodies linger on in the song of the Skylark! 

Before moving to Whidbey Island, I taught writing at the University of Southern Maine, Maine College of Art, and Portland State University where I developed a writing and presentations curriculum for graduate students in the Engineering & Technology Management Program. My students in that program learned, among other things, that running a PowerPoint slide show is not a presentation. Other experience includes managing high end engineering proposals and editing for professional, corporate, government and institutional clients. For the U.S. Forest Service, I incorporated literature into management consulting projects and became known as "the lady who comes and reads us poetry."  On one particularly gratifying occasion up the reaches of Hells Canyon on the Snake River, they read it back to me...

A COUPLE OF ARTICLES BY OR ABOUT ME

Coal mining and family history
seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2003848617_utahop23.html

On my book, On Our Way to Somewhere, A Comedy Drama in Four Vignettes 
http://www.lagrandeobserver.com/Features/GO-Magazine/CHANGING-THE-ROLES-OF-WOMEN