SAILING AROUND THE WORLD – As a young woman, I set off on the adventure of a lifetime, spending six and a half years sailing around the world on La Gitana with my husband and two children. During that time I came to appreciate how tiny and insignificant we humans seem in the natural world that surrounds and supports us. We appear to be living on the edge of the wild, the largely untamed and unknown world into which we are embedded, exploring the borderlands that lay between the human and the more-than-human worlds, and the ways they overlap and mirror each other. This adventure inspired so much of what I did and wrote about afterwards.
TEACHING AND ADVOCATING – When we returned home to California, I was eager to contribute to the well-being of the world I live in. I earned my masters degree in English and went on to teach the two subjects I love most, literature and composition, to college students. I started a Service-Learning program at one of the colleges where I taught, placing students in the community to gain real-world experience that they could write about. Eventually I left the academic world to become a community advocate. As the director of the Santa Barbara County Action Network, I worked toward preserving open space and the environment, and helped secure funding for affordable housing and public transportation.
WRITING AND BLOGGING – During all of this time I was writing: short stories, poetry, essays and articles which appeared in literary and academic journals, as well as sailing magazines.
Now I live with my husband among the rolling hills and vineyards near Paso Robles where I have been writing full-time. I started blogging about my life on the high seas, about the wild life I encounter here in my new home at the edge of a nature preserve, and about art and literature, sharing my poetry and essays and writing about the thing I love most–writing.
MY NOVELS – My debut novel When Things Go Missing will be published by Sea Stone Press in September 2025. The first book in my romantic adventure series set in Central America, This Sea Within, will be published in 2026. I’ve also finished the first book in a series for middle graders based on my family’s experiences sailing around the world.
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Each week I’ll be writing about art, literature, poetry and what it means to be human in a more-than-human world. This includes stories about our sailing adventure, and the simple pleasures and adventures of living fully in the here and now.
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