About

Growing up in Cheverly, Maryland, in the late 1950s and ’60s, I played with friends for hours in the woods behind my house. A fallen tree became a pirate ship sailing the open seas. Many an unlucky box turtle was, regrettably, adorned with my initials in nail polish before I set it free. At dusk I would lie in bed listening to the flute songs of wood thrushes rising from the woods, though at the time, I didn’t know the birds by name.

When I was 11 years old, my family moved to Hingham, Massachusetts, a quaint New England town with a beautiful harbor, where, in summer, we launched our boat and fished for flounder. Summers in Hingham were milder than those I’d known before. Winters were long and dark. Plows pushed snow into mounds that reached the tops of street signs. There, they lingered for weeks, crusty and blackened, like icy fortresses.

Soon after our move, likely spurred by those bitter-cold winters, my father began feeding and watching birds. He learned, and taught me, the names of our avian neighbors. He built me a small, wooden platform, which he placed outside my bedroom window, where I could sprinkle seeds and get an up-close view of the birds.  For a lonely preteen, birdwatching became not only a fascination but also a comfort, as it is, still, today.

About the time we moved to Massachusetts, my grandparents moved from Washington, D.C., to retire in Florida. Throughout my teen years, I wrote to them and eagerly awaited their replies. When I was perhaps 14, my grandfather, who had been a typesetter and proofreader for the Washington Daily News, told me, “You should write.” I took his words to heart and never let them go.

In the ensuing years, since my graduation from the College of the Holy Cross, where I majored in English, I’ve worn many professional hats: child care worker, writer and editor, wildlife advocate and lobbyist, and even drum circle facilitator. Writing for Wonderful West Virginia magazine and then serving as its editor from 2006 to 2014 was a joyful chapter in my career.

Today I live and work in Charleston, West Virginia. In recent years, I’ve combined my passions for nature and writing in personal essays that have appeared in anthologies and other publications, among them The Brevity Blog, Stonecrop Review, Still: The Journal, Woods Reader, Wonderful West Virginia, and the Charleston Gazette-Mail. I am thrilled that several of these essays appear together for the first time in my first book, Soul Friend and Other Love Notes to the Natural World, released in Spring 2025 by Blackwater Press.