I was raised in a family battling alcoholism. What is did to me was raise my anxiety, fighting to survive my father's rage, sloppy drunken hugs, and absence in our family. It left me not being able to trust or love easily. I preferred to stay in the shadows for years, watching, rather than risking and taking a chance at a better life.  Through a supportive partner and therapy, I've worked to step out of old habits and understand enabling, co-dependency and guilty, along with the feeling that "something bad will happen" because the next bad thing is only around the corner.  It's how we feel growing up that way.  So how to tell this story without going into the same old books?  I combined it with a combination of my love for baseball and romance.  The value to the reader is understanding your friends, siblings, perhaps even parents on a deeper level, maybe even yourself. The other value I strive for is to encourage women in particular to ask for what they want from their relationships...relationships of all kinds.  There are many examples of love, love of family, friends, and lovers, and intimate, vivid details that will hopefully let you love my family as I've loved them, with all their dysfunction. It's my pleasure to be a part of this community.  My influences? Recovery and Hope, always hope, Brain injury, Al-Anon, Women, Ashley Judd, Hilary Clinton, Barbara and Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, Jada Pinkett Smith and so many more. Writers? Hemingway, King, Rice.

Just starting out, but so far I've spoken at Sister's Consignment Boutique celebrating Sisterhood, am helping to put together an anthology of poetry for Redwood Writer's, part of an anthology of Sisterhood stories coming in March.