About Me

I have been teaching writing for most of my adult life, in elementary schools, in colleges, in people’s homes, in hotel lobbies, in quiet corners of restaurants, and once on the rooftop bar of an L.A. hotel. These days I do most of my work by phone or Zoom.

In my mind, there isn’t much difference between wanting to write and wanting to live. The urge to create can also be part of an urge to become a new version of yourself—the version who brings this new thing to light. I believe people who carry unrealized projects in their bodies often look for coaches and support in the same way women look for support when they are giving birth. When I had my daughter, I remember thinking during labor, This can’t be right. This hurts too much. This makes no sense. How can a body come out of there? I had strangely similar feelings while writing You Don’t Look Adopted. I needed to hear, over and over again, This is an important project. Your voice matters. Your story matters. Keep going. You have to keep going. Change—doing something different, saying something you’ve never said before—can feel like dying. It’s good to have someone there to remind you that you are coming to life.

Writing You Don’t Look Adopted is the thing, aside from birthing my daughter, about which I am most proud. I tried for decades to write it, and then, in three months, out it came. I still get emails from people thanking me for writing a story they could have written themselves if they’d had the words. I have also lived my dream of creating a movie. I never imagined this would involve traveling to Austin, to New York City, or to Madrid for film festivals. I never imagined getting a positive review in The New York Times even while the movie barely scraped by with two tomatoes on some other forum!

My mother lived with the dream of writing a book for decades but always felt she didn’t have the time or the qualifications. The dream finally won out, but she died before she finished the first draft. A team of friends and family stepped in to polish it and get it to publishers, and Louisa Catherine: The Other Mrs. Adams was picked up by Yale University Press and was positively reviewed in both The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review. What a thing it would have been to celebrate these achievements with her! And, so, what I could not do for her—get her to start writing before it was too late—I do for others.