I’ve heard it said that when we’re kids, the work we fantasize about doing when we become grown ups is oftentimes what we wind up doing, ultimately. If we’re true to ourselves, that is.

For me, this has been true to a large extent.

As a little girl, growing up in a small town of 600 people in the midwest, when I played pretend, I was a writer and a teacher. I LOVED the written word, and thanks to my mom reading to me incessantly from the time she could hold me on her lap with a book in front of me, I was able to read at a fairly high level by the time I started kindergarten.

I remember writing stories in my bedroom at my peg board desk, then fashioning tiny books with stapled spines and crayon-designed covers. I also remember writing plays, taking them to school, and directing them with my classmates during recess.

I didn’t know what the words “novelist” or “playright” or “screenwriter” meant, but I knew I wanted to write books and tell stories that would transport me and others to worlds unknown, because reading fiction and connecting with stories when I was a kid was medicine to my soul.

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My writing practice is my spiritual practice. It connects me with with deepest parts of myself and it connects me with the cosmos. I am a writer, yes. And I am a word witch.

I consider writing to be an alchemical process that transforms and changes me every time I put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. This transformation, this change, is not always easy… It takes me down to the clanedstine caverns of my soul and transmutes me on a cellular level.

It’s oftentimes hard.

Always fulfilling.

That’s why I call the process the “rough magic” of writing. 

Want to read some of my work?

Here you go.