About me
"Tell me a story," says the reader, so I do.

If there's been a constant theme about my adult life it's that of acting as the translator between worlds. Negotiator, mediator, I gravitate to the space in between, straddling camps, and find myself neither all here nor all there, a tympanic membrane vibrating in response to the tones on either side of me, telling tales in the language of my audience, of worlds that speak their own language.

I was raised in Lower Merion Township, in southeastern Pennsylvania: a suburban Arcadia with easy access to small-scale woodlands. Tramping through the woods, messing about in the streams and "camping" in the underbrush nurtured my love for nature - especially those parts of nature that you could put in your pocket, like rocks and baby toads. I decided I wanted to be a forest ranger when I grew up, but the brochure they sent me said that women weren't welcome in the Forest Service. As if the trees cared!

In high school, I was the editor of the literary magazine, an environmental activist (I installed a green shag rug in my bedroom and painted the ceiling yellow; if you remember those as the colors of the Ecology Flag, you probably had one, too), and also a pre-pre-med student, even taking Organic Chemistry on Saturdays ("I love the smell of butane in the morning!"). On my college application essay for The University of Chicago I agonized about my desire to reconcile my interests in science and the humanities. After ricocheting back and forth between the two poles for a couple of years, I picked one, and there I was: an English major. Out of all the varied and wonderful texts I studied, it was Ulysses that proved to open the door to enlightenment; that one can make a work of art out of an ordinary day - that the quotidian is the stuff of eternity - was an insight that struck me like a pint of Guinness between the eyes, and left a mark the size of a lodestar on my brain. What I lived for during college, though, was my radio show: as a DJ for WHPK-FM I got to discover music, and then share it with my listeners, creating sets that were themselves (when done right) creative acts too.

After graduation I attended Columbia Law School, where I was Managing Editor of the Law Review. Practicing commercial law, I negotiated the desires of my clients into agreements with their counterparts, then translated the agreements into legalese-- those magic words that none of them ever wanted to have to read again. Bound, gagged and decorated in gold leaf, the mammoth contracts were created with the understanding that they'd be consulted only in the direst circumstances. Yet still, those books embody the value of process in achieving equanimity among disparate interests. Several sagging bookshelves later, I moved to the information services field (earning an MLS from Rutgers along the way). Again I found myself on the cusp: translating the needs of my customers into systems that did what they wanted, explaining the new digital world in analog form, and negotiating between the worlds of those who have questions and those who have answers.

Having worked in environmental planning at a New Jersey watershed association, I am now the Executive Director of the Patuxent Tidewater Land Trust, and also work as a freelance writer (reference books, essays, articles, fiction and poetry). As a naturalist and environmental advocate I am realizing my long-frustrated goal of melding what should never have been put asunder, the study of the physical world and the exaltation of the spirit.

Being engaged in civic life is a conversation between individual and community. For several years I was chair of the Plumstead Township (Bucks County), PA Environmental Advisory Council, a volunteer citizens board that advises municipal officials and educates residents about environmental issues, such as biodiversity, ecological landscape management, water quality and habitat conservation. To commemorate my service, an oak tree was planted in Owl's Nest Park; this was a great honor, one normally reserved for memorials -- to be able to watch the tree grow and bear fruit within my lifetime is an undreamed-of privilege.

For most of my life, I've been surrounded by the Eastern woodlands that nurtured my childhood love for trees and rocks. I spent an extended sojourn in beautiful Sewanee, Tennessee, which is perched on a bluff at the southern tip of the Appalachians: the point where, depending on your perspective, those woodlands end, or begin.Where I now live, in southeastern PA, the woodlands interweave suburban and rural landscapes. I'm on the edge, always in transition.