I’m a writer living in Davidson, NC, an idyllic college town located on the shores of sprawling Lake Norman. I cohabit with 2 dogs, and a man I dearly love most of the time.
I’ve been writing since I was eight years old, about the time my father bought an old typewriter to do some writing of his own. Well, I simply could not, to my father’s consternation, leave the thing alone. I eventually ended up breaking it, because I could not keep my hands off it. My fascination for it, I remember, baffled me. He did not thank me for that as you can imagine, which I can’t blame him. He had some literary aspirations of his own.
It wasn’t until after college that I became serious about writing. During my early college years I had my writing illusions shattered by an English Prof. who seemed to take great delight in scribbling a giant red “D” on my first composition. Actually it was a D+. Nonetheless, I was humiliated and immediately withdrew from the class. I took my writing back into the closet and it took me a good many years to get my courage back to try another writing course. But I persevered, somehow, and ended up finally finishing a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing.
My Bachelor’s Degree was in Nursing, which I followed up with a Master’s Degree in Psychiatric Nursing. During those years I tried on a lot of hats. Waitress, nurse, head nurse, ER triage nurse, psychotherapist, mechanical drafter–yes, that’s right, a mechanical draftswoman for a civil engineering firm. All grist for the mill. Lastly, I finished a MFA in Creative Writing.
I’ve published short stories in Potomac Review, Confrontation and other literary journals. I wrote a collection of short stories for my MFA thesis and a collection of fictional vignettes for my master’s thesis in psychiatric nursing. I’m currently finishing my second novel, a soft SCI FI, post-apocalyptic novel, Dreamer’s Island . My first novel was very different, in some sense autobiographical and was about a young man developing schizophrenia titled, Tess’s Truth.
As stated elsewhere, I’ve been in lots of writing groups along the way, all of them inspiring in one way or another. I’ve found they’re the most reliable way for me to stay accountable. A little healthy competitiion can go a long way in forcing one to stare down the intimidation of an empty page, to unflinchingly face the flow of imperfect words, sentences, even paragraphs that will inevitably appear. And can happily be fixed.