My Bio
I’m an author of fiction & memoir and & a teacher of life writing.
My work as a storyteller began in video and film. As a documentary producer for PBS, I sought out the motivations of people who choose not to vote in presidential elections. For the UN, I shared survival stories of women’s reproductive health in Kenya and Nicaragua. With National Audubon Society, I created This Island Earth, combining music performances and indigenous storytelling with nature footage and scientific research to open hearts and minds on the links between human health and endangered species. Aired on The Disney Channel, This Island Earth garnered two national Emmy Awards, one for me as writer. My next film took me to Yellowstone National Park.
Indigenous Knowledge Systems
To make Wolf Nation, I accepted the invitation of Northern Arapaho elders to help them tell their version of the reintroduction of the Gray Wolf to Yellowstone National Park. In the film, Mark Soldier Wolf shares an ancient prophecy warning of man’s destruction of the earth, one species at a time.
Click to watch Wolf Nation on YouTube.
While living and working in the S. F. Bay Area, until 2022, I produced medical and educational web content and wrote feature articles for Scientific American MIND, Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and Brain World (Click on the linked page to see multiple articles). That led to a staff job managing a science blog network and social media for the open access, research publisher, PLOS, where I worked for six years.
MY FEATURE ARTICLE IN SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND.
As a freelancer, I’ve authored (or coauthored) five popular science books, mainly on neuroscience and psychology, and a memoir, A Lethal Inheritance, published by Prometheus Books. I began my memoir from the perspective of a mother dealing with a son’s mental health crisis, but I finished it as a forty-five-year old woman coming to terms with her own lifelong depression, and a family history of mental illness and addiction.
Trauma and Healing
.About my memoir, Andrew Solomon wrote “This honest and lucid book will be invaluable to families trying to understand their own history and those who’ve been blind to that history.”
Ten years after publishing A LETHAL INHERITANCE, I identify as a neurodiverse woman with valuable experience to share, which I do as a writer of personal essays and novels, and as a teacher of life writing. In my ongoing work toward reducing stigma and increasing awareness of family mental health, I’ve served as a board member for Mental Health America/CA and given talks to The National Academy of Sciences, and PPL, The Parents Professionals League, and many other parent groups and organizations. On my MENTAL HEALTH MOM BLOG, I answered questions that keep parents up at night.
I’ve long been interested in the intersection of writing and healing. An essay I wrote for Nieman Storyboard, “The Implications of Plot Lines in Illness and Memoir,” draws on Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller to explore this rich vein. The obvious next step was to explore these themes in a novel.
Available in print, ebook and audiobook on June 13, 2023.
My debut novel, Orchid Child blends cutting edge neuroscience with wonder and the history of the Irish people, particularly Irish Americans, to go beyond the mapping of generational trauma. It imagines the family’s youngest member halting the chain of suffering that came before him by tapping his neurodiversity and the ancient wisdom of his Celtic ancestors.
Pen USA Award-winning author, Laura Pritchett wrote, “Orchid Child is first and foremost a wonderful story, engaging and interesting from beginning to end. But there’s a bonus: neuroscience, epigenetics, topics relevant to our times. A beautiful and smart book."
Contact information for Orchid Child press, publishing, bookseller, events, & reader inquiries.
Recent clips by and about me, and my writing path.
Intergenerational trauma as autofiction…
I appeared on the podcast STORIES THAT EMPOWER, talking about how I identified my family's intergenerational trauma going back three generations, and how the process of healing that trauma yielded my debut novel, Orchid Child. Released January 24, 2024, you can listen to the interview here.
The Alchemy of Fiction, Women Writing, Women’s Books blog.
Ten Bits of Irish Slang that made their way into Orchid Child, on The Next Best Book Club Blog.
Reflections on Joe Biden’s visit to Ireland, the “faerie eddie” of Irish American sentimentality, in Village Magazine IRE.
Ten Books that Inspired my Debut Novel, on Whispering Stories blog.
On Amanda’s Book Corner, I talk about the intersection of neuroscience and Celtic mysticism in Orchid Child. Watch the interview on Youtube.
"Readers are smart, they don’t need to know everything that happened before the thing you’re writing about. They’ll figure it out." Read my Authors Guild Member Spotlight interview.
My Teaching.
Since Summer 2022, I’ve added teaching to my writing journey. I put it this way because I’ve found that not only am I loving it, I don’t think I’d be a very good writer if I wasn’t helping other writers, giving and receiving inspiration as part of an international writing community.
I began in the fall of 2022 teaching a class on memoir writing for Southern Oregon University’s Lifelong Learning program, OLLI. That experience evolved into an eight-week online class called When Memoir Becomes Autofiction, where I take a group of memoirists through the unique creative process of fictionalizing their own lives. I’ll offer this course again, beginning May 8, 2024, once more through WritingWorkshops.com.
Get more details on my teaching and consulting work on the workshops page.
More of my writing about writing.
The fluidity I was going for in ORCHID CHILD is reflected in the term, neurodiversity. Figuring out how to write it was another matter.
How today’s literary culture drops the ball on autofiction.