Writing was my first love.

I discovered the joy of finding a story, yanking it up by the roots, and looking at it from every angle in sixth grade, when I wrote an essay about my Sicilian immigrant grandmother. The freedom to highlight the qualities of hers that I admired, but weren’t spoken about in my family, like her secret feminism. The magic began when I followed my own affection and curiosity about her and trusted my gut. I wrote about how she supported her family when her husband was injured, instead of what a good housekeeper and mother she was. More details emerged, seemingly from nowhere, that allowed me to paint a picture, to get something across. My sentences marched into formation, creating structure; or sometimes they got lost, meandering through unexpected territory. I was hooked.

I kept following that curiosity, into one story after the next, finding a fit in journalism, creative nonfiction and personal essay. Meaning popped up from the most unexpected places, like magic mushrooms poking through shit. The most awe-inducing thing of all was that people responded, creating not just a platform for self-expression, but a conversation.

I grew up in the South Bay Area and currently hail from San Jose. At 18, I followed the treeline north to the beautiful Pacific Northwest—the University of Oregon–where I earned my bachelor’s degree in journalism and communications, with a second major in theater arts and a minor in women’s studies. Here I discovered the heady pleasure of paid writing gigs–writing a column, news, arts and entertainment, and the culture beat for the Oregon Daily Emerald and the Eugene Weekly.

Then I meandered again, much like the hypothetical (and perhaps; alas, the real) sentences above: I became a certified hypnotherapist, guiding people to wander through the subconscious and unearth the stories that held them so that they could change their own narrative to that which supports personal growth. 

That was interesting. So, I followed curiosity again and pursued a master’s degree in counseling psychology with emphasis on depth psychology, at the (also beautiful) Pacifica Graduate Institute, home of the Joseph Campbell Archives. 

As a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, I counseled people from all walks of life, with symptoms ranging from severe psychosis to relationship problems and just about everything in between. This culminated in 15 years of private practice in San Jose. While I insist that I was and am a generalist (in therapy and writing!) I was known for working with people in the alternative lifestyle world-kink, polyam– and the LGBTQIA community

And then my first love—writing—called me back.

Now, I cover San Jose news, arts and entertainment for Metro-Silicon Valley and meander through my own psychological past on my Substack, After the Estrangement, It Fell Into Place. 

What’s fallen into place for me as a writer, is that I never really left the path. 

A therapist is a story-keeper while the writer is a storyteller.

They are two sides of a coin.

What is most important is that stories heal.

I take the risks to write stories that reveal what needs to be exposed and celebrate hidden gems. Psychotherapy taught me to listen, not just to my subjects, but to YOU, my editors. I strive to support you and make your life easier in bringing stories to your audiences.