Why I Write

When I was five, I reduced my friend, Mary Ellen Gaffney, to tears by telling her the tale of a horse  who got very sick but whose cruel owner wouldn’t call in the vet because it would cost him money. Before I got to the part where the horse was saved, she ran off home.  In that moment, sitting out on the backyard lawn of our house in Arlington, Virginia I knew I  was a storyteller.  When I was nine, and by then living in Albuquerque, New Mexico (I grew up in an Air Force family) my story, The Watermelon Mountains, based on how the Sandia Mountains got their name, won first prize and got published in our class newsletter. My first published story! I was hooked! I was a writer!

In the intervening years, I went off to college, got married, had a daughter, got divorced, went back to college, earned a BA and MA in creative writing, and plunged headlong into corporate America, specifically Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as teaching technical writing at San Francisco State University. In those years, I worked on a novel off and on. However, between supporting my family and career building, I wrote only intermittently…but the pressure to write was building like flood waters behind a dam.

In 2010, I made a commitment to myself to write a weekly blog for a year at OpenSalon.com which is now defunct. I needed to get into the habit of writing on a regular basis. On September 30, 2015, I retired after 35 years in the computer industry to devote myself to writing and to teaching creative writing.

This website is to introduce you to the creative writing courses I teach,  my novel (as I struggle to place it with an agent and get it published), and my other writings. My blog is a place to share not only my struggles with writing, but other stories and thoughts as well.

Pour yourself a cup of tea or a glass of wine and drop in any time!