This is me. Extroverted, eclectic and curious.

I’ve been telling stories in one way or another since I was four. It all started in Columbus, Ohio 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 girl just like me skipped up the black keys through the forest, birds trilling through her fingers.

Before I knew how to write script, I pretended I could. Then, inspired by Anne Frank’s diary around age nine, I started keeping one, myself. That got me writing short stories and plays; and poems soon followed, well into adulthood. Some got published. Many I read in front of people in smoky Bellingham and Seattle bars, and at places in Victoria and Portland. 

Fiction and poetry, and films, have always informed my articles and business-communications writing. Words love to carry plot, imagery, metaphor, tone, rhythm and music, no matter where they go, transporting meaning and mood. Along the way, there are no boring subjects. One of my first freelance assignments was for a trade magazine, to describe the toothpaste displays in five Seattle grocery stores. I turned it into an exciting travel piece. 

My favorite 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, the scary fates of African lions and Antarctic ice, and the best way to break a bad habit. And when it comes to people, everyone has a story to tell. Usually typing as they talk, I’ve interviewed people from all walks of life—from famous photographer Mary Ellen Mark and Miss America 1999 to surgeons and chefs, financial planners and software experts, the homeless and the wealthy, Buddhist teachers and even a boxing ring girl. 

But look. I can’t be at this computer all the time. That’s where friends come in, and volunteering with a local photo gallery. And reading a good book. Or I get on my bike, or walk through some kind of woods or next to waves. Then there’s everything a city offers up. And give me music anytime, preferably live, with a flamenco guitar, sitar, cello, sax or banjo. 

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