About

I was an international newsroom journalist (Tokyo, London) when I felt a strong call to give it all up. I was being called to something bigger, but I didn’t know what.

Raised in rural Missouri, I left this life, earned a journalism degree, and moved to Tokyo. No one I knew had ever been abroad. I left rootedness for air. I left family and tradition for floating above a culture so different from my own. I left thick bloody steaks for thin glistening sushi. I left thick oak doors for fragile shoji partitions. Carpet for tatami. Beer for sake. Boisterousness for subtlety.

There is no better mirror for seeing the self than living in a place where there are no cultural cues, where you do not fit, where even the language cannot interfere.

After working as a journalist in Tokyo, after working in a newsroom during the death of Emperor Hirohito and the cultural sea change that wrought, I spent a year traveling Southeast Asia — India, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia. When I was a little girl of 7, I remember telling myself: One day I’ll travel the whole world. Hiking the Himalayas in Nepal, a camel trek in the Thar Desert in India, hitchhiking the Australian outback – it was a time not easily labeled, nor easily forgotten.

And then there was London. London – I fell deeply head over heels in love with her. I worked hard to establish myself as a journalist. I was working at London newspapers when the Berlin Wall fell and when Princess Diana died. My most intense memory is the smell of thousands if not millions of dying flowers at Kensington Palace. People came to pay their respects to Diana and left flowers at the palace. An acre of flowers piled on top of each other — the smell of giddy perfume and putrid rotting. Sweet. Death. That smell will stay with me forever.

I loved my crazy, jet-setting life that was disconnected from rural Missouri, but was connected to the entire globe. I loved it so profoundly. But then came the “call”. I was meant to be doing something else. But what?

It all began to unravel. It shattered into a million pieces. I had to go home. I had to find out who I truly was.

What followed were many years of self-exploration, Everything I had defined as mine was taken away. I had to start from scratch and build. But build what? Who was I?

I first explored my mystical side, and for years studied tarot, shamanism and past lives. I write all about this in Water, my fourth novel. I started to do readings for people using tarot. Today, I estimate I’ve given 4,000 plus such readings for people all over the world.

Slowly, I started writing fiction. Slowly, I remembered visual art. I used to win awards for my art as a child but hadn’t touched it in more than a decade. I started to paint again. I also slowly started to sit down daily at a computer and write fiction

I started teaching writing. Students came up to me after class and asked for one-on-one writing coaching. A book coaching business was born. Today I have helped thousands of people learn to write. I have clients from Singapore to Seattle, writers of healing memoir, magical realism, self-help books, and film scripts. Clients have been featured in the Financial Times and the New York Times and have won major national awards.

Today, as a novelist, visual artist, and book coach, I live by the core values of creativity, authenticity, purpose, and contribution. My five novels: Earth, Air, Fire Water, Ether are about one woman in search of her mystical purpose. The first three won Independent Publishers awards, and the fourth is currently being considered for the same award.

​As a visual artist, I built a yurt art studio in the woods, where I see the use of color and texture as a sacred act, as I paint in acrylics and watercolors, and hand-make journals.

​I am deeply grateful for this new life of fiction-writing, art and creative service to others.