Bio
Writing has been a passion for over forty-five years. I love to research the details of a story, make it new, shape it, and then introduce it to readers who, I hope, will be as captivated as I am. My interests are broad and include Louisiana history and culture, natural history, the arts, foodways, and travel. My genres include narrative nonfiction (aka feature writing), essays, books, and public relations work, most often for nonprofits.
I've enjoyed a diversity of experiences that have included: serving as the Public Relations VP for a regional retail chain; a semester teaching feature writing at LSU; a week, on two separate occasions, teaching feature writing in a program for young journalists in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia: teaching conversational English to teenagers in rural Poland; as the keynote speaker at the LSU Writing Across the Curriculum conference; as a panelist at the Louisiana Book Festival. I've canoed (very small) bits of the Mississippi River and ridden a towboat pushing forty barges along the Big Muddy; I've hiked in Alberta and Montana, biked in Spain and Eastern Europe, had two knees arthroscoped, and can tell tales to my grandsons about living long and seeing much of the world.
Perhaps my most poignant writings have been helping craft obituaries for friends--a rewarding, though challenging, use of my language skills. But, early on when my kids were young, I often wrote essays about life in a household bustling with family activity and the vagaries of raising children.