I write personal essays and other effluvia; I teach the personal essay through Essay Intensive, and edit the writing of others “like a joyful shark.” I offer birth doula childbirth support to people becoming or re-becoming parents and help people capture their birth story narratives. I support clients trying to figure out how to feed their infants and babies, because inclusive lactation and feeding support buoys new families.
I support students and clients 10-104 years old from all backgrounds to write in a way that feels good and says what they mean. I help people ground in their physiology to face their hardest moments. I value clarity, transparency, open-heartedness and deep, deep listening. If you want my CV, please request it here.
It is lucky to be trusted by people at their most vulnerable hours, wrestling with the viability of their ideas or birth preferences or their feelings about feeding with their bodies or bottles.
I believe in the generosity of the dark, and irreverence. At 4:30AM, life is extra-present, my 4 children (I’m “Mom” and “Stepmom”) and husband sleeping, their quirkiness refigured in dreamscapes. Don’t underestimate what those over-caffeinated with Jasmine Tea can accomplish before the sun gets busy. My Faith is that all our creative output begins as scraps, and grows like those incredible sponge monkeys we had as kids that expanded in water-- until Frankie drank one on a dare (and lived, but uncomfortably).
This site: In the same scintillating year, I became a mother and stepmother, exhilarated and challenged to show my children—bio, step, and students— writing matters, and how and what we birth matters.
Oh F-Yes, it really does.
Breast milk, "ink" and ideas flowed after giving birth more copiously than I could have ever anticipated. The Mother of All Beginnings.
From all that creative juice came this site, Motherink, an irreverent place for personal essays, for doula-ing, for community. In my mind, all this belongs together, for this is the way life presents its curriculum. And I-- emulate. I hope to serve life, and while I am at it-- you.