I’m dedicated to helping writers put their good words into the world.

I’m an author, writing coach and editor, memoir instructor, and publishing consultant with over four decades of experience. I specialize in memoir and other nonfiction.

Some of my memoir students and coaching clients write their books for family. They call me an invaluable guide. 

I began my publishing career as a magazine editor at Women’s Sports & Fitness and went on be associate editor at Ortho Books and a regular freelance editor for Ten Speed Press, Chronicle Books, and other Bay Area publishers before starting my own editing and consulting business in 1995 and teaching memoir at colleges and universities in California and Southern Oregon. My books are Lesbian and Gay Marriage: Private Commitments, Public Ceremonies (Temple University Press) and Girlhood in America: Personal Stories 1910 – 2010) (SZS Publishing). My memoir, Living in the Long Shadow: Surviving a Legacy of Mental Illness, publishes in fall 2026.

I have presented on memoir at the Redwood Writer’s Club, California Writer’s Club, Story Circle Network Conference, and the National Memoir Writers Association and I was an editorial consultant for three years at the San Francisco Writers Conference. I have taught weekend memoir intensives and online classes at universities in California and Oregon and have taught memoir at Santa Rosa Junior College for sixteen years. Currently, I have a weekly memoir workshop on Zoom. A video addressing self-exposure and the exposure of others in memoir is available on my site.

In Sonoma County, I write, study piano, take lizards away from my orange tabby cat Sunshine, and work with writers from around the country and around the world from the beauty of my countryside office.