I learn from life. I love learning, but especially words. I am influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay...I remember a line from a poem about touching a hundred flowers but not picking one. At 12 yrs. old I wanted to write that profoundly simply. I have learned that not all writers are LOVERS of words. Some journalists for example, report. They don't like words, even. They tell it. I aspire to write like Van Gogh paints. Like impressionistic dribbles, and not everyone HAS to ''get'' my poetry. I don't care. I come from -humble- beginnings. I'm a nurturer by nature. Got my first rejection slip at age 16. (I deserved it.)As for the nurturer part, its a good thing, because I just can't let an idea die, I keep going and going until I squeeze life into it. It usually works... Influences: husband is one, but influences to write are everywhere

Achievements: Three kids who stay out of major trouble and seem like nice enough people. Intelligent, creative, fun. Ages as of 2002, are as follows: 7, 12, 21...Caregiver to terminally ill husband. Optimist.Maybe its not terminal?
Writing successes: KALEIDOSCOPE (poem, ''Holy Dust Motes'')
and story 'Cause Its Friday.
PLANET VERMONT (two stories in inspirational paper, the second which paid more than I expected and came at a time when my ego was flagging and I got a needed boost to writing esteem)
HEARING HEALTH (this story was about my relationship with my deaf grandmother.It was inspired by a temporary brush with deafness when my eardrum burst. My grandmother and I had communicated with pen and paper, I was very quiet-she read the notes and answered me aloud. I even had a deaf cat from her shed...)
MARCH ST. PRESS PARTING GIFTS ( I am a three time contributor to this small press who was the first to publish me. Holy Dust Motes 'essay version' appears in one anthology, as does a fiction story about talking crows which truthfully; could've been fleshed out more...)
BOOK (I wrote for about 7 years, tweaking, lovin' rearranging, THE BOOK, till I got it just so...never thinking I'd write the last chapters the way I did. It turned out to be about Lou Gehrigs Disease toward the end. It didn't start out that way...)
Currently, I'm finding a place to publish the book. These things take time.
POETRY (as I said, its hard to find homes for poems. Sometimes they hit you at 3 a.m. they can be born at any time, sometimes quickly, sometimes the labor is long....three months. Sometimes the birth of a poem is a year or more after sitting in a drawer ignored on and off for weeks and months. Some poems are deformed monstrosities that have lines of hope and one day will be whole...)Upcoming work:
I have a few stories coming up in anthology JUNE 2003 available at BARNES and NOBLE called Women From Another Planet.
Another anthology is in the works with my story Must Hang Up Your Coat to be inside it. I do not yet know what that book will be called or when it will be out. It is about working life...Do look for the Women From Another Planet book. There are a lot of talented women writers in it......

I have poetry coming up in Clay Palm Review (CPR) and by the way this book of poetry has fine art in it, art of hands, the palms of the hands, that is...And yeah I might actually see publication of my poem, poetry is so hard to find homes for! If in fact the editor gets her self back from Italy, which her mother says should be late 2003. Another late 2003 publication for me should be my essay about my mother and me. When I was 12 she almost died, I was an only child and I wrote a little something called "stars and coffeecans" for Chicken Soup For The Mother Daughter Soul, not to be confused with the reams of chicken soup books already out there...This one won't go to press for quite some time and should be my biggest check yet. Yay. KALEIDOSCOPE's 'Cause Its Friday is reprinted here onsite. When the editor was interviewed for a story my local newspaper did on me, she was quoted as saying she 'liked my sense of humor' and that my writing 'drew the reader into the story...' As for the story, I wish I never had to write it, but like most stories that seem to 'move' others in some way, the subject matter was one I never would've chosen. My husband is 40 yrs. old now. He was diagnosed at 37 with Lou Gehrigs disease. It has stolen many things, eventually it will take his voice and I will become his voice. The story is about the life sentence the doctor gave us when he he said 2 to 6 yrs. We have an ordinary family-3 kids, two cats, and Pralphdog. I write about the mundane, like going out to eat dinner because its Friday. BUT the starkness of the illness seeps into my writing. I was very happy when the editor was quoted as saying I had a sense of humor. I didn't plan it that way. Maybe that's why I'm happy with the piece. It happens to be the last chapter of THE BOOK> I'm now working on BOOK 2.