About the Author
Why yes, that is a photo of me and my two cats, Toby and Maverick, at the Grand Canyon. We were on our way out to Los Angeles for graduate school (round-two), and I simply couldn't pass up the opportunity to have a photo taken with my boys at a national park.
Whims and fancies are just part of my charm. I am half cautious and half spontaneous. I am logical and creative, kindhearted and critical. I am a bundle of contradictions, which means I am human.
Writing has been a fire inside me since I learned to read. The first poem I bothered to keep was written on September 19, 1997. I was 15. Since then, stories have flooded my mind: keeping me up late, drawing my attention away from tasks, and making me talk to myself in public. Some minutes it occupies me, as short stanzas poetically capture a mood. Some days it consumes me, as forty pages flow from my fingertips in twelve hours. And some years it calls to me, as I wove my story with the fictional life of a woman not so different from me.
You might not believe I'm a farm girl from eastern Connecticut (I certainly clean up nicely). You might widen your eyes a bit when you ask where I went to college, and I ask "which one?" I have four degrees, you see, two of them master's. You might stare at the very few photos that exist from my undergraduate years and shake your head in disbelief, telling me you have no idea who that woman is, who weighs 215 pounds. And you might have known me for years, and when I tell you I've finished my first novel and answer your inquiry about its topic, you tilt your head and say, "I never knew you were bipolar. You're one of the nicest and funniest people I know." I want to correct your misstep in grammar (I'm not bipolar, I have bipolar disorder), but instead I smile and ask: "What's your point?"
Because my diagnosis is simply one part of me. It has made me stumble, but it has never stopped me. How boring would any of us be if we were defined by just one thing?
Whims and fancies are just part of my charm. I am half cautious and half spontaneous. I am logical and creative, kindhearted and critical. I am a bundle of contradictions, which means I am human.
Writing has been a fire inside me since I learned to read. The first poem I bothered to keep was written on September 19, 1997. I was 15. Since then, stories have flooded my mind: keeping me up late, drawing my attention away from tasks, and making me talk to myself in public. Some minutes it occupies me, as short stanzas poetically capture a mood. Some days it consumes me, as forty pages flow from my fingertips in twelve hours. And some years it calls to me, as I wove my story with the fictional life of a woman not so different from me.
You might not believe I'm a farm girl from eastern Connecticut (I certainly clean up nicely). You might widen your eyes a bit when you ask where I went to college, and I ask "which one?" I have four degrees, you see, two of them master's. You might stare at the very few photos that exist from my undergraduate years and shake your head in disbelief, telling me you have no idea who that woman is, who weighs 215 pounds. And you might have known me for years, and when I tell you I've finished my first novel and answer your inquiry about its topic, you tilt your head and say, "I never knew you were bipolar. You're one of the nicest and funniest people I know." I want to correct your misstep in grammar (I'm not bipolar, I have bipolar disorder), but instead I smile and ask: "What's your point?"
Because my diagnosis is simply one part of me. It has made me stumble, but it has never stopped me. How boring would any of us be if we were defined by just one thing?
