This is me: Extroverted, curious, eclectic.

It all started on our family’s big old sea-green upright piano. I’d pound storm clouds in the low notes and rumble them into thunder, while rains pelted around Middle C and lightning slashed the high end. Or sometimes, a little four-year-old girl just like me skipped up and down the black keys through the forest, birds trilling through her fingers.

Music and fiction have always informed my freelance writing. Nonfiction, poetry, visual art and film have, too. Words love to explore rhyme and rhythm, imagery and metaphor, drama and plot, no matter where they go, transporting meaning, mood and message.

My favorite freelance gigs take me into whole new worlds. Like the times I learned all about the history of the double bass, the microbes wiggling around in our bellies and the scary fate of Antarctic ice. And I've interviewed people from all walks of life—from famous photographer Mary Ellen Mark and flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia to surgeons and research scientists, chefs and engineers, top CEOs and mom-and-pop retailers, former homeless drug addicts and wealthy philanthropists, prominent Buddhist teachers and even a boxing ring girl. 

Everyone has a story to tell. I've always had a listening ear. Whether it's an article on a heart-attack survivor and his robotic surgery, a donor-impact story for a philanthropic foundation's annual report, a profile on an award-winning photographer or a scientist's grant proposal that I've polished up, what matters most to me about my writing is that it does some kind of good in the world. 

As of today, October 7, 2019, I’m working on articles about the experiential-marketing arm of an international creative agency, and the latest research in cannabinoid medicine. The author of a health-related book continues to meet with me to discuss its content and organization; and the website for a wedding and landscape photographer is still in progress. The website I just finished editing for Project InsideOut—at the intersection of psychology and climate change—should be up soon. So should my Chamber Music magazine article on the Shanghai Quartet, appearing online and in print. This morning I just hit “send” on my article on a gay country-western band called Lavender Country. Look for a couple of my most recent articles under “MY WORK,” soon, on the opioid epidemic in the rural Northwest, and missing and murdered Indigenous women and children.

But look. I can't sit at this computer working all the time. There’s climate disruption to do something about, and those poor souls at the border. There are dinners with friends, cultural stuff, the galleries; and moving my body through space on a trail, a beach, a bike. And I’ve always got a book going, right now one on the science of the brain and Buddhist philosophy.

And give me music anytime, preferably live, with a guitar, sitar, cello, sax or banjo. 

Oh, and a piano, too. I still play.