My Own Story
My family moved often when I was a kid—from Oklahoma to Louisiana to Wyoming to Texas to Colorado. As a young adult, I continued the pattern of moving, spending time in Arizona, Oklahoma, Indiana, Missouri, Vermont, and finally Massachusetts. As a result, I never truly felt a sense of home.
I suppose I write in an attempt to locate home, some center point that grounds me. I started reading plays as a child, pulling anthologies off of library shelves, bringing them back to my room, and stacking them next to my bed. I was drawn to dialogue. As a teenager, I played guitar and wrote songs. And as a young adult, I wrote poetry and then created folktales for friends of mine—stories that included imagery and moments from their lives. Somewhere in that mix, I started writing plays.
I am drawn to storytelling that combines the visual with the written: plays, picture books, comic books, graphic novels and memoirs. Someday, I would love to collaborate with an illustrator on a graphic story of some sort. In my adult years, I have tried my hand at creating small watercolor, ink, and gouache illustrations. Some of those decorate this website. Not surprisingly, the images combine human made objects with nature: a chair by the window with sky showing through, a house-cat sitting on star, the wind blowing through a window-screen. The images tell stories, and all my stories have in them a quest to find that perfect breeze, that comfortable chair, that sense of place.
Lately, crows have congregated in the Norway Spruce trees in my back yard. They caw so loud as if they want me to come outside and play. I know better: it’s a trick, but I go anyway. And once I step out the back door, they fly off, laughing into the air. I watch them go, and then I come back inside my orange house and try to write a story or plan a class. Or maybe I just stare out the window. Diane, my partner of 13 years, shares the orange house with me. She makes it a home, in all ways. And our dog Gizmo, rescued from a pound when he was two, he makes it a home, too.
Because the idea of stories—both as something to read and something to live—matter to me, I hope this website reflects that.