About Me

As a child, I drew a self-portrait of myself as a bottle full of inky swirls, pushing toward the top, where a giant stopper held everything tightly inside.

This is to say, I have always felt flooded by emotions and full of swirling ideas.

It is also to say…I have long felt silenced.

Where I come from, there was a lot of shushing and stoppering that made me yearn to be truly seen and heard.

So, like many quiet children, I turned to books.

I could live loudly and vicariously in their pages and did until an elementary-school teacher encouraged me to write.

Writing became the place where I expressed my hidden feelings and observations.

I grew up, got an English degree, and built a career in communications. I continued creative writing on and off over the years until I landed in the poetry and lyric prose program at Simon Fraser University, The Writer’s Studio. There the program founder, Betsy Warland, taught me my most important lesson about writing:

We write alone, but we can only keep writing with the help of a community of writers. And I had found mine.

Meeting and working alongside other writers helped me understand what had been missing in my on-and-off writing years. With their help, I generated enough writing to complete my first collection of poems, Galaxy, published by Anvil Press, in 2011.

I believe that by writing honestly and attentively, we express our true hearts and can connect in a fundamentally disconnected world.