This is me: Extroverted, curious and 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 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, 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. 

But look. I can't sit at this computer all the time. There are dinners with friends, cultural stuff, networking groups, hiking and biking, and two to three books going at once. And give me music anytime, preferably live, with a guitar, sitar, cello, sax or banjo. 

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