About Me
My first collection of poems, Threads & Dust, a chapbook, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2005. In 2004, I was awarded a William Stafford Award from Washington Poets Association. My poems have appeared in numerous journals, such as Calyx, Floating Bridge Review, The Pacific Review, Quercus Review, StringTown, and Switched-On Gutenberg, as well as in many anthologies. As a photographer, I have numerous exhibitions and awards to my credit. I’ve taught workshops in creative expression for photographers since the early 90s, and for writers nearly ten years now. I hold an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Antioch University Los Angeles. Currently, I live and work in Anacortes, Washington.
Uncropped for the Curious:
I was born in Portland, Oregon. My father was a publisher and my mother a stay-at-home mom. Both of my parents encouraged wide reading, but it was my mother who nourished the arts, filling our library shelves with books on art and enrolling me in ballet classes at age five. Even though I loved drawing, painting, and writing most, I dedicated myself to dance, and was accepted into the New York City Ballet School by seventeen. After a year of grueling study, I left the school and worked in an art department for two years before deciding to go to college. I had already begun to write haiku, and in my first year at the university I favored literature and philosophy courses. Somewhere in all that I married, had two children, and with my then-husband, relocated frequently. Then, like the odd turn in a dream, I went on to earn an undergraduate degree in psychology from Wichita State University, a master’s degree in counseling psychology from Chapman University in California, where I became a licensed psychotherapist, and a certificate in creative expression, before I received an MFA degree in creative writing and poetry at Antioch University Los Angeles.
In the mid-seventies I had acquired a camera. I especially loved nature photography, having developed a deep communion with the natural world as a girl growing up in the forested hills of Portland. It wasn’t long before this avocation became a preoccupation. I made two trips to New Brunswick, Canada, in the early nineties, to study with Freeman Patterson, author of Photography and the Art of Seeing. Also, inspired by the work of Minor White, I went to the Zen Mountain Monastery in New York to study with one of his students, John Daido Loori, abbot and author of The Zen of Photography. As my work grew and won awards, I founded the Center for Inner Focus in Seattle through which I lectured and led photography workshops in the Northwest, Southwest and Canada. These “Creative Vision” workshops were devoted to the art of seeing and the study of photography as a Zen art. Later workshops focused on writing and poetry in addition to photography, and they incorporated the creative expressive arts such as drawing and movement.
Two decades later I returned to writing. I immersed myself in creative nonfiction and poetry coursework. Two of my teachers, Seattle writer Rebecca Brown and poet James Bertolino, encouraged me to go for my MFA in creative writing, which I did at Antioch University Los Angeles.
Making art, I had discovered, is healing and essential to being human. I retired from my psychotherapy practice to pursue writing, photography, and the facilitation of workshops full time.