About Me, You, and Bears
I’m originally from the dairy-farming country in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York State, where there are more cows than people. I have a B.A. in German and French language and literature from McGill University and the University of New Hampshire, and a master’s degree in education from UNH, both with highest honors. I also attended art and drafting school for three years, where I found out that I could draw a straight line with a ruler but not much else. In my first career I taught ESL and French in a variety of public schools and businesses in the U.S. and Canada and owned a language school in Montreal, where I lived for 15 years.
I’ve been writing and editing professionally since 1997. I started out as a copyeditor for State University of New York Press, where I worked on fiction and nonfiction books for 9 years. I became a freelancer because I wanted to build closer working relationships with authors.
I’m located in the central lakes region of New Hampshire. Location is not at all a factor in my work in the era of globalized communications—I work with authors and businesses across the U.S. and in Europe and Asia, and we get to know each other quite well.
In my spare time I read and write fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature; play the acoustic guitar and piano (badly); explore the back roads of New England; and kayak, bike, and hike. My greatest passion is kayak camping on beautiful remote lakes in Maine.
I take pride in working on books and other writing projects that have significant social value. Many of my clients are motivated by a strong desire to effect social change and empower people by writing about topics like social justice, racial relations, historical events, health, healing from trauma, and spirituality. It’s a privilege for me to serve these committed authors and to support their efforts to do socially relevant work while advancing their careers or their personal satisfaction.
One of the great pleasures of my work is forming meaningful connections with people who are very different from myself. They are college and university faculty, artists, filmmakers, lawyers, anthropologists, social workers, physicists, musicians, psychologists, and more. They come from the U.S., Canada, Ireland, Germany, Mali, China, Mongolia, Cambodia, and Indonesia, to name a few countries. Most of them live in urban areas. They don’t have to chase bears off their porch like I do and they’re mystified that I like to sleep in the woods with them.