About Me

I grew up in La Porte, Indiana, and my childhood there informs my stories, especially those set in the mid-twentieth century. La Porte is a short drive from where Lake Michigan last kisses the Hoosier State. It’s a modest county seat tucked into verdant farmland, with cracked sidewalks and solid people. A controversy recurs occasionally: whether to put a space between the little “a” and big “P.” Other controversies and eccentricities have glimmered below the surface, the kind I like to write about. Characters are my fascination.

The Midwest has remained my family’s home most of my adult life. Now my husband and I live on the Kalamazoo River in Saugatuck, Michigan. I revel in its seasons, the dark trees, the shoreline of what we call “the big lake.” Nature appears more often in my work.

I started writing stories in 2016. I’d stepped back from being a full-time lawyer to consult part-time from home. I published stories in literary journals and took workshops and classes, learning to write non-legal prose, stuff real people would read. Soon I was fully committed to a writing life. My character-driven stories and creative nonfiction have been selected for publication in The Forge Literary Magazine, Blue River Review, Quartz Literary, Pithead Chapel, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and Hypertext Review, among others. Later I wrote essays, some about writing. I’ve been an occasional guest essayist for Brevity Nonfiction Blog.

Twenty-one of my best stories are collected in a manuscript entitled Secrets and Other Hobbies. It will be published in 2026 by Cornerstone Press.

I have an undergraduate degree from Marquette University and a law degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although I’ve tried lawsuits before judges and juries, done a lot of public speaking in and outside the U.S., and managed employees and business crises, none of that is as hard, or as crazily fulfilling, as writing.