Do you remember a language older
than time, when a shiver down my mother’s
spine was worth a thousand words 
and the melancholy in my father’s eyes,
reflecting Lake Geneva, was indecipherable?
There, unbeknownst to me 
in a world inhabited by swans, 
I too swim in concentric circles
to find the resonance of my core 
and discover that in dreaming 
lies the healing of earth. In dreaming
we travel to a place where all is forgiven.
In dreaming is the Divine created.

Journalist · Social Worker · Author of Smacked: A Story of White-Collar Ambition, Addiction, and Tragedy

My most well-known work is probably the story I wrote for The New York Times upon which my memoir Smacked is based, and that process was unique because it was almost a cathartic unloading and exploration (of addiction of loved ones) I needed and wanted to do. It was a pleasure to write that, because I needed to do it so badly. For the novel I'm now working on, I find that when I'm starting a new chapter and thinking about these characters I've been living with for a while now, it helps if I get out in nature and take a walk or a hike and just put myself in the character's shoes for a little while, think about what they are going to say, who they'll speak with, what they will do. And then I get home and jot down all those thoughts, and use those notes later to write the chapter.