So, a horse walks into a bar…

It’s 1999 and a seventeen-year-old American girl sits on the banks of the Loire, sketching the chateau across the quai. She’s from a tiny mining town in Nevada, but somehow she landed in a small French town where, for five months at least, she didn’t speak the language and so she stopped eating.

Yeah, that was me. I’m stubborn and weird in a lot of ways.

Back to my story. That was when a married couple peered over my shoulder and told me my sketch was good. They were residents of the town and had spoken French, and for the first time I didn’t notice, and I responded without a hitch “merci” (thanks.)

It was that moment or soon after I realized there’s power in language and belonging, in nationality, in the color of your skin and the clothes you wear, and where you are from. Granted, I didn’t have the right language or nationality and therefore didn’t really belong, but could do a passable job because I was white and had a pair of real Levi jeans, so long as I didn’t open my mouth, I wouldn’t get robbed.

That’s the story of how I became a moody person with a pedantic infection in which my blood was invaded by semicolons and footnotes, and I decided to major in English Literature (which meant “books written in English” although the majority of those were, in fact, authored by those who were British). Then I got not one but three master’s degrees, the last an MFA in creative nonfiction from Saint Mary’s College of California.

Fast-forward through years of not having money or hope and in 2018, I co-authored the memoir A Court of Refuge: Stories from the Bench of America’s First Mental Health Court with Judge Ginger Lerner-Wren. I have also worked as a ghostwriter for several book projects, most notably Kevin Hines’ memoir Cracked, Not Broken: Surviving and Thriving After a Suicide Attempt.

These days, I mainly publish essays, most of them about my experiences, travels, and my life. I’m particularly fascinated by the relationship between language and memory, the body (embodied existence), and physicality, which also includes the intimate connection between culture and cuisine, travel, psychology, and creative expression.