Welcome to my website! I’m thrilled you’re taking a look around. While you’re here, let me tell you a little bit more about myself and why I’ve created this space.

I’m a writer, spiritual director, and story midwife who dances with the deep questions of life.

A Writer’s Beginning

I’ve enjoyed creating with words since I was young. In elementary school, I wrote stories about roller skating dragons, bewitched kites, and vegetables demanding equal rights. One Christmas I recruited my two younger sisters to help act out the play I’d written about Santa Claus. My youngest sister, cast in the role of Santa, stuffed a pillow inside Dad’s red winter coat and donned a white beard cut out of a roll of the polyfill Mom used for various sewing projects. Over the years I’ve written poetry, personal essay, and memoir. And I’ve filled countless journals with thoughts, emotions, life lessons, and details of both ordinary and extraordinary days.

My Year in Paris

Several years ago, I circled back to the seed of a book that had been planted years earlier—a memoir about moving to Paris after college to work as a nanny and study French.

When I shared stories about nannying for a six-year-old in France, people would sometimes encourage me to write them down. That book would have included quirky anecdotes about French culture and the ups (coming to love a little girl) and downs (ironing and playing Barbies for hours on end) of being a nanny.

But it wouldn’t have been the whole story.

Sharing My Story as a Healing Practice

It took years to gather the courage to write about the twenty-two-year-old who was sexually assaulted by a stranger just a few weeks after moving to Paris. Years of counseling, journaling, reading, and other healing work. Years of learning about and accepting the effects of trauma on my body, mind, and spirit. Years of searching for and finding my voice.

I’m writing my memoir, Toward the Light: A Year in Paris and telling my story for three reasons. First, through sharing my story, the shame of it dissipates. Instead of being burdened by the secret, it holds the potential to help others.

Second, I want my nieces and nephews to know what I experienced and, more importantly, that I survived. As they grow older and face the inevitable challenges of life, I want to show them, through my example, that they can be brave and afraid and resilient, too. And finally, I want to offer a wider audience of survivors and their loved ones the opportunity to discover transformation, courage, and connection from my story.

Choosing a New Path

In the midst of writing the book, life happened. In 2015, after a nearly twenty-year career as a government attorney, I quit my job without a plan for what would come next.

To reconnect with myself, I spent a month on a spiritual pilgrimage, walking the Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain. A year later, I returned to graduate school, eventually earning a Master of Theological Studies degree from the Iliff School of Theology in Denver.

In researching my Master’s thesis, which has informed and transformed my writing and my life, I dug into how trauma affects the body, mind, and spirit. What I learned helped me better connect with my twenty-two-year-old self. I developed a deep compassion for her. She went through so much in such a short period of time. She persevered and came through the other side. The best parts of her remain with me today—resilience, courage, and bravery.

A few weeks before the pandemic hit in 2020, I applied for a spiritual direction training practicum. I wanted to use what I’d learned in seminary to help other women reconnect with the best parts of themselves. The practicum was delayed due to COVID and then redesigned into an online format. Over the course of nine months, I learned how to companion others by offering compassion and listening with an open heart. Showing up for monthly one-on-one online meetings with directees reminded me of our shared human experience, messy and amazing and hard and joyful. The Divine Mystery (that some refer to as God) showed up in the connections with my directees and with others in my practicum cohort.