About Me

From 2001 to 2022 I lived with my mother and brother at St. Francis Farm, a Catholic Worker  community in upstate New York where I spent my days attending to gardens, goats and guests and my evenings reading and writing eclectically. In 2022 St. Francis Farm closed because my mother was growing tires, my brother was ready to move into another kind of work, and we were unable to find other people to join me.  I am looking for another community to work and live in. I spent seven months in 2022-2023 at Jubilee Partners in Georgia, a Christian intentional community which grows food sustainably and welcomes refugees. They found me insufficiently orthodox to stay with them long-term, but I am grateful for all that I learned there about trauma, resilience, and accompaniment.

I grew up in two homeschool groups, one rural, conservative and Christian, one city-based, progressive and ecumenical.  So far as I know my family was the only one to attend both groups. I grew up fascinated by people and their varied convictions,and also by books, which I was free to explore at leisure since I didn’t have a class schedule. Teaching myself economics, I became dismayed by the ways in which people and the planet got hurt by the prevailing system, and decided to try doing something different.

So I found St Francis Farm, where once again I had the chance to hear and take part in the stories of people with very different ideas and backgrounds.  I’m still fascinated by our differences, and by the web of connections, economic and spiritual, that hold us all together. I’m still trying to figure out how we can do less harm and more good through those connections.  Farming and neighboring is part of how I figure that out. Writing is the other part.

I’ve been trying to write stories since I learned to write at all; when I was very small my mother found me in the driveway, trying to write a story in the sand with a stick and crying because I had stepped on some of the earlier parts.  My technique has improved a bit since then. I started getting letters in the newspaper when I was nine, got my first story published in 2011 when I was 30, and started writing and editing for hire in 2012.  I finally wrote a novel that still seemed good to me by the time I’d finished writing it in 2017; in 2021 it was published by Propertius Press. In 2022 WolfSinger Publications published my short story collection “Believing is Seeing.”