ABOUT ME. . .
I am a writer, teacher, and mother living in Nashua, New Hampshire, with my husband, two children, and two Labs. I grew up in the Canadian Maritimes, and the deep ties to water and rugged spaces that live in me are rooted in that background.
I graduated with a degree in English from Gordon College and then earned a Bachelor of Education from Dalhousie University. I later earned a Master of Science for Teachers of English from the University of New Hampshire. I began my career teaching high school social studies and then went on to teach middle school English. After my children were born, I began teaching college writing. I currently teach professional writing at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts; narrative medicine in the MFA program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts; and creative writing at Nashua Community College in Nashua, New Hampshire. I completed my MFA in creative nonfiction through the Stonecoast Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine. I am currently completing a certificate in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.
I love words. And I love to play with words on the page. My head is a busy place. An endless film reel plays in there, its frames alive with images and moments, actual and imagined, that I’ve tucked into the folds of my memory. I watch them over and over again, shaping and reshaping, ordering and reordering, trying to make sense of them, searching for the story they want to tell and the language with which to tell it.
Unpacking experiences of life and loss is at the core of my writing. When I was thirteen, my father contracted HIV after receiving blood containing HIV during open-heart surgery. He died of an AIDS-related illness ten years later. The complicated nature of his disease and the grief of his death have had a lasting impact on me. My writing is the vehicle through which I'm learning to understand that impact. The stories filling the pages are helping me to better understand myself.
