About
Greetings and welcome to my website—I am so glad you’re here and hope you will find much of interest and nourishment.
Let me share a little bit more about myself.
As I described in my memoir, What I Forgot…and Why I Remembered, I grew up amid the skyscrapers of Manhattan, but was fortunate to spend weekends and summers at my parents’ country home in upstate New York. I have always been a country girl at heart.
I attended Hunter College High School and went to college early, earning a BA degree in English literature and journalism from Bard College/Simon’s Rock, at 19 years old. After working as a reporter and photographer for small town newspapers for several years, I returned to NYC and worked my way up to managing editor of a New York business magazine, before returning to graduate school.
At New York University, I earned an MA and PhD in Comparative Literature; my dissertation focused on contemporary personal narratives from the Americas by people with complex cultural and individual identities, writing in Spanish, French and English. This led to my first edited book, Women Writing Resistance in Latin America & the Caribbean, now in its second edition from Beacon Press.
For some 25 years, I raised my two sons, taught college classes, organized major annual conferences for International Women’s Day and year-round events featuring women writers in and around my home region of the Berkshires, Massachusetts. I became increasingly engaged in promoting the power of creative expression as a tool for social and environmental justice and activism, which led to my co-founding Green Fire Press, intended as a more accessible publishing platform for “books that make the world better.”
More recently I’ve been working to build a vibrant community of kindred spirits through my writing workshops and the new Birth Your Truest Story virtual community, which I am so delighted to co-host with my longtime friend and writing partner Audrey Kalman.
As I say in my most recent book, Purposeful Memoir as a Quest for a Thriving Future, I believe each of us has the potential to make the world better, just by our very presence and how we show up each day. We can choose to use our power of creative expression to become worldwrights, a term I coined taking off on the word playwrights: playwrights write plays, worldwrights write to right the world.
Righting the world can take many forms! These days one of my favorite ways to make the world brighter is by spending time with horses, whether at home or abroad, leading my special brand of RIDING & WRITING trips to beautiful places in the world like Italy, Iceland and Portugal.
Whether I’m teaching a college class, leading a writing workshop or working one-on-one with an author, it’s my passion and my pleasure to help others share their creative voices and visions with purpose, power and clarity.
Please have a look around my website and check out my Writing Life blog, along with my recent interviews, talks and articles.
If I can help you bring your voice and vision more strongly into the world, don’t hesitate to be in touch—just use the contact form at the bottom of this page. Sign up for my monthly newsletter to get some inspiration in your inbox, along with news of upcoming workshops and events.
In closing, I want to share with you a recent example of my own “writing to right the world”: a poem I wrote for my “Soul Force” workshop in 2021, a very difficult year to be sure. I took the depressing poem “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats and brightened its dark vision with my own soul force.
I don’t believe the world needs any more dystopian visions, we have those aplenty!
What we need now are positive visions of the better world that could be, and that will be if we all turn our hearts and minds to the task.
Are you ready? Let’s go!