about

photo:  Christina B Photography, September 2013

Me:  I grew up in the mountains and valleys of Tennessee, where I fell in love with dogwood and honeysuckle.  My favorite things to do were to read books, go for walks in the woods with my father, play in the field next to our house with my sister, and make things with my mother.  I now live in Minnesota with my own family.

My husband:  I can't even write about him without dragging out the cliches:  cannot believe my luck, stars aligning, or at least weird shifts of fate.  We had plans that didn't involve either of us being in the same city that summer of 1999, nor even knowing the people who managed to have us cross paths, but here we are, nearly sixteen years later.  He is easily the best thing that has ever happened to me.  The feminist in me needs to also say:  I know, I know, my world does not revolve around a man, but it does burn brighter because of my partner whose support and love have gotten me through so much.

My children:  I love.  An intense, intense amount.  My daughter is four and my son is two, and here come some more cliches:  I could never imagine life without them, I've never known this kind of love, I would die for them.  All true.

My education:  I've not quite taken the path I expected.  When I was eight, I firmly wanted to become an author, and I blame Anne Frank and my mother, who gave me my first blank book, for this word-hungry life.  It could have been any author's fault; I grew up in a house full of books and it was love at first toddle.  There are stories of me trying to read newspapers before I could sit up and carrying around a notebook in preschool, asking how to spell chrysanthemum and diplodocus.  I expected to go straight from my undergraduate degree to an MFA, but I panicked, paused for an M.Ed first, taught high school for a few years, and then got the MFA (in poetry).  (PS:  I still can't spell.)

My career:  Sometimes you can find me teaching writing in the university.  I've written two poetry chapbooks as well as a full-length lyric essay called Nestuary, which is about fertility treatments and pregnancy and difficult birth and nursing, but it's also about the body as medical object, and invokes mythology and strange quirks of our culture and shame and failure and triumph.  I also run a literary journal called Tinderbox Poetry Journal with an insanely talented poet, and I'm a member of the Caldera Poetry Collective, and I generally feel awfully lucky to be able to do what I do in the realm of the written word.  You can learn more of such things on my webpage.

I also seem to contend with this self that seems both wholly separate and symbiotic--a self that wants to live simply:  to go for walks in the woods, to eat whole foods, to become in tune with the body and mind, to make with my hands, to dig in the dirt, to build callouses and to do it with my children.  Perhaps it's a desire to cleanse myself of complication.

I've named this blog for the sumac that grows on our bluffs and the tufts of sorrel that shoulder their way up in our lawn.  They also happen to be the names of incredible natural dyes.  Please don't be shy; I love company and community.

Last updated:  3/24/15