In 2012, I realized that after having submitted work consistently to contests and publications around the region,   I had enough material to create a self-published collection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. I intended to call my first collection So Far, because it was what I had written so far in life. My friend and fellow writer Denton Loving, however, encouraged me to dig deeper within the collection to find a title from within, assuring me that So Far was really quite terrible. (A conversation with Margaret Atwood in September 2013 showed that she felt the same way when she told me that I should thank God every day of my life for a good friend like Denton who was willing to tell me the truth about that title!) In sharing some of the works’ titles with Denton, I mentioned Dog Days and Dragonflies, a poem in the collection. Denton grinned broadly and said, “There’s your title!”

The next year, I decided to tackle the issues of mental illness in society broadly, and more specifically within my family. The result was a collection of prose and poetry released in October of 2013 entitled Running From Crazy.  Should you ever decide to write along the lines of this topic about your own family, just realize ahead of time, that most families don’t like their family history shared publicly. My mother used to go with me on occasion when I attended events to sell my books, and if people picked up Running From Crazy, or asked about it, she would tell them, “Don’t buy that one! It’s just a pack of lies, just a pack of lies!” Which actually made people more curious and probably helped me sell a lot more copies than I would have without her being there with me.

In 2019, I went to a writer’s residency called The Orchard Keepers that my dear friend Denton runs as a space of solace and solitude to work on projects. I went with one project in mind, but left with the biggest part of a collection of Christmas and holiday stories completed. With the help and encouragement of my multiple-hat-wearing friend Matthew Kingesly (stretching back to my college days), the title for this collection became Blue Ridge Christmas.

 Currently, I am working on a couple of projects actively including a travel book about a 28-day holiday in the UK and Europe during the year I left my job as a librarian and learned to live to write. The working title is Chasing After Rainbows, a line from a Duran Duran Song (“The Seventh Stranger”), as the entire trip was built around a book signing at the Edinburgh Book Festival in Scotland, where Duran Duran bassist, John Taylor, read from his autobiography, In the Pleasure Groove.