A bit about me…

I write stories about relationships, usually a little broken. I write stories about personal heroism, characters who work a bit too hard, love a bit too much, or are a bit too sassy for their own good. In many pieces of my work, mortality suddenly becomes all too apparent, and the fleeting moments of life suddenly become all too precious.

As an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz and Bennington College, I immersed myself in literature, loving the spare elegant beauty of Hemingway and Hammett, glorying in the sheer word pleasure of Chandler, and losing myself in the intense complexities of Joyce. I wrote many short stories and a noir detective novel.

While earning my MFA from UCLA, I learned how passionately I love structure as I deconstructed countless films, and became familiar with the tools in the film and TV dramatist’s tool kit. I wrote many screenplays as I worked to find my voice and perfect my craft.

After UCLA I was privileged to work on numerous projects involving the stories of Louis L’Amour. I love Westerns. I love the edge of the frontier and the purity of the narrative arena. The technological limitations give a writer immense freedom in depicting energized, taut character drama.

Dramatizing Louis’ short stories into one-hour radio plays was an invaluable apprenticeship into the art of writing for performance. I was given a mandate to create scripts that worked well for a performed medium, so I learned to translate dialog that sounds good on paper into dialog that doesn’t sound artificial when spoken. With each new script, I increasingly understood how deeply the words need to make sense to an actor, with every beat clearly and logically leading to the next. Without a logical and muscular structure to a script, the words start to ring hollow as the actors feel the ground giving way beneath them.

My lifelong work in theatre production with a touring Gilbert & Sullivan opera company gave me invaluable insight into how to write for the stage. Calling a show innumerable times allowed me to hear all the variations of dialog and delivery and learn what worked with an audience. When I wrote my first libretto, I pulled in all of that experience and wrote “Hail Poetry: The Magic and Madness of Gilbert & Sullivan” – a love letter to the act of doing theatre through the eyes of its creators.

Since Hail Poetry, I have been writing for the stage. Using the production and administrative chops I learned with Opera A La Carte, I am now working with an amazing team at Arts A La Carte, dedicated to developing new works by underserved artists.

After many years of storytelling, I now firmly believe that making art is a sacred duty and one of the very truest forms of resistance.