Welcome to my online home, where I share writing resources, tips, ideas, stories, and, most of all, encouragement for living a life of focused writing and reading in a world that continually tries to pull us in too many directions at once. I am an author of both non-fiction and fiction on a variety of topics, in particular creativity, education, parenting, individual potential, and the Great Plains.
Bio
While my writing life began before I can remember, my writing career began with a food and cooking column in a Milwaukee-area food and wellness magazine, the Outpost Exchange, and, from there, grew to include newspaper and magazine articles, online articles, four books on education and parenting, and children’s historical fiction. I’ve always been drawn to write about my current passions, as a way to understand them, and I’m thrilled when my journey intersects with others. Most recently, I’ve been working on a book about the diaries of my great-aunt Hattie, herself a writer who wrote daily diary entries from 1920 through 1957 on the Great Plains of Nebraska and South Dakota. In the process of doing research about Hattie and her place and times, I discovered Oscar Micheaux, who, before he became a filmmaker, homesteaded on the same reservation where I grew up. Learning about his life led to a children’s historical novel, Oscar’s Gift.
In addition to writing, I teach writing, technical composition, creative thinking, and other humanities courses to wonderfully intense engineering, business, and nursing students at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. I also enjoy speaking across the country about intensity, giftedness, learning, homeschooling, and creativity, and I write a blog on these topics for Psychology Today.
Thank you for stopping by! What do you need to live a writing life?
