Longer Version

I have spent a lifetime listening for the stories inside people, ideas, history, and memory. On long afternoons after school, a friend and I loved to take turns writing a story. I'd write a few sentences, she'd add the next few, and back and forth we'd go. Looking back, that childhood game foreshadowed the two halves of my working life: writing my own books and helping others write theirs.

Undergraduate and graduate study in literature, especially in poetry, taught me to hear language at the level of rhythm and sentence, a way of reading that continues to shape both my writing and my editorial work. After graduate school I returned to Boston, where I taught at Boston College, the University of New Hampshire, and Harvard Business School, worked in a used/rare bookstore, published two memoirs and and co-edited a Boston best-selling essay collection.

I eventually hung up a shingle as a developmental editor and collaborator. For nearly twenty years, I've worked with leading management scholars, physicians, psychologists, and educators, helping them discover and shape their books. I especially enjoy helping experts communicate complex ideas to the audience Virginia Woolf called "the common reader.” In addition to clear prose, that often involves illustrative vignettes and narratives. I am always honored to be invited inside the world that makes up a book, and I love becoming fluent with a new life story, field, or mindset. 

Today my own writing practice includes a growing shelf of works in progress—essays and fiction that ask how individuals intersect with memory, history, and belonging. I've learned that some stories take years to find their shape; others arrive all at once. I can't imagine writing without reading. Reading is one of the richest experiences I know; every book I admire shows me another way of seeing or thinking. I feel extraordinarily lucky that my days are filled with reading, writing, and conversations with people who also care deeply about ideas and stories.