My memoir was my first attempt at writing, but I set it aside when I couldn’t figure out the right hook. I returned to sewing and rethought my writing goals. But after our move to Oregon, I was compelled to write again, to help myself redefine ‘home,’ to reestablish roots, to rediscover my empty-nester self, far from my familiar past.

I had an idea for a novel. It was a hero’s journey about a woman from the Midwest who uncovers her true self on the Oregon coast. Fiber art, foraging, and the forest all play a part in her healing. I was writing what I knew. HOME SPUN. It’s the novel I needed to read to remind myself of the healing power of art. The unpublished manuscript was a finalist in the 2020 PNW Writer’s Annual Competition in the Mainstream Fiction category.

After I finished HOME SPUN, I revisited my memoir. The journal I kept during our move was the key, forming the backbone of the reimagined story. Themes emerged from the hinge moments of my life. Loss and love. Life and death. Houses and gardens. Belonging and belongings. Change and transformation are inevitable. The challenge is how we accept them. TANGLED ROOTS: An Artist’s Memoir of Change and Transformation is my story. It was a finalist in the 2021 PNW Writer’s Annual Competition in the Memoir category.

As I finished writing my memoir, another heroine, Carolina, emerged, wanting to tell her story. She was an academic and poet whose life was devastated by the sudden death of her husband and child. She, too, traveled to the Oregon coast in search of answers. Carolina hoped, despite overwhelming hopelessness, that living in her husband’s inherited family home would offer her a way forward. WILDWIND is the story of her hero’s journey. The unpublished manuscript was an award winner in the 2020 Seven Hills Literary Contest in the Adult Novel category, and the first chapter was published in the 2021 Seven Hills Literary Review. It was also the third-place winner in the 2021 PNW Writer’s Annual Competition in the Mainstream Fiction category.

Writing about Carolina’s love of poetry inspired a desire to write about my life in poetry, to reflect more lyrically about the turning points. RIVER RUN ROOTS: An Artist’s Memoir in 51 Poems is my story in verse, focusing on the transformative gifts of love, family, home, nature, and art, themes that echo throughout all my writing.