Just the Facts Ma’am Bio

Day job: Advertising copywriter.

Night job: I write about where Mother Nature and human nature collide — in my backyard, my neighborhood and my mind, mostly.

Full of Herself Bio

Hatched in Minnesota, I came East at 28 and began as a public relations writer in a large New England advertising agency. I was part of a creative team that won many awards and achieved outstanding results for client's publicity.

I moved to the copy-writing side of advertising and began cobbling words together to differentiate clients and deliver even greater results.

Writing essays at night began during menopause as a futile attempt to fight insomnia. Later, I wrote my way through the loss of two brothers, my sister and two close friends, all in the space of eight years. As loss piled on loss, I kept writing.

When my first-person essay "Garden Vigilantes" was chosen for Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion website, that was all the encouragement I needed. I received three top national awards from the Garden Writers Association (GWA) — one for Garden Vigilantes, which chronicles how quickly nurturers turn to killers, and the other for Mulch Madness, which recounts some unlikely places mulch ends up. One judge said: “Mulch Madness made me laugh out loud." My essay “Grieving Garden: This Too Is A Garden,” received the best Digital Writing Award.

“Forgetting” was chosen from thousands of submissions for Chicken Soup for the Soul: Age Is Just a Number, part of the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul series. The series has been translated into 43 languages and published in over 100 countries. More than 500 million copies have been sold worldwide. Read what the Litchfield County Times had to say https://bit.ly/3dU6ONg.

Berkshire Homestyle Magazine has also featured many essays: Catholic vs. Lutheran Gardeners, On Clotheslines, Wobbling Towards Vertical, to name just a few.

I come from a long line of storytellers. Most notably was my grandfather, who dispensed gasoline and stories for 60 years on the corner of Highway 60 in Mountain Lake, Minnesota, and still found time to make moonshine and harass the local Mennonites. He was featured in both the book and the TV special On the Road Again.

I continue my day job as an advertising copywriter for radio, direct mail, blogs, videos, Internet, you name it, in a variety of categories from hardware to education. I've written emails for George Carlin and other celebrities.

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