our blinds were partly open

as the night filled the empty spaces

except for the light from the moon

that hit my gaze perfectly

when I put my head on the pillow

I wrinkled my nose

then I thought

when was the last time I saw the moon

I saw the moon through my window

what a blessing that is

…

Analysis

This poem was inspired by the night I thought the moonlight would keep me awake. The moon was showing perfectly through our blind slats. I was frustrated that it was disturbing my sleep. But, as I say in the poem, then I wondered, “When was the last time I saw the moon?”

How often do I take nature for granted? The things I can experience that I forget exist until they stop my normal. I’m thankful for the nature that disrupts my normal.

Leave a comment

grief is a troublesome thing

it appears when you hear the word katydid

or eat mac ‘n cheese for dinner

or meet someone named Alex

or see an ultrasound picture

it’s so troublesome

that it gets shoved down deep

into the nether region of the heart

but grief is buoyant

rising once again

until you skim it out for examination

and there is more you didn’t get this time

…

Analysis

I wrote this poem after a day of teaching. It was the end of the year, and I honestly didn’t read the material. I knew the goal, but I didn’t read the whole book that we would read. When I did, we read the word katydid. My throat constricted, and tears pricked at the corners of my eye.

That was my nickname for my best friend growing up, Kaitlyn. She died when we were 26. I thought that it had been enough time, but five years wasn’t enough time.

I thought about the other people in my life and moments that cause me to recognize grief. It appears when I least expect it. I’ve read so many people write saying the same thing, and I think this poem speaks to those moments.

What surprises you with grief?

Leave a comment

I don’t actually remember exactly why I wrote this poem.

What lingers in my mind though is that I interacted with a stranger, someone who seemed young to me. With two kids in tow and my white hair acting as highlights, I looked older to her, I’m sure because I could tell she was struggling with whether to call me “ma’am.”

She wasn’t much younger than me. But I’m over thirty now so somethings twenty-six seems young still.

I started wondering if because I see that she’s young, that I am old to her. Do other people see me as old now?

I know the answer is two parts. It depends on where you are in life. To young girls, I see the looks when I’m walking around with two kids. The looks say, “I do not want to be in your shoes.” They still have some independent years left. To older women, they see young. I see the way they watch me with the kids like “those were good times.”

It doesn’t matter if I seem old now. I am in some ways. I am not in some ways.

My back hurts when I wake up, getting up from the ground is a challenge at times. But I can deadlift my over 30-pound children. I can hold my 68-pound dog in place while I give her a bath (which she is terrified of). I can reach the top shelf of the cabinets.

It’s so much about being seen as old or young. It’s about recognizing where I am and embracing it. If I don’t, I’ll think I’m too old too soon.

Leave a comment

I wonder if I look old to you

the look you have me

wasn’t one of peer connection

it was confusion of where I fit

in respect to your age

my white hairs might have been hidden

but the lines

that crease my eyes are not

you look young to me

so I must look old to you

Leave a comment

I wrote “a little bit of this and that” after looking at my nana’s old cookbook and saw her recipe for homemade rolls. I thought about how I haven’t eaten them in so long and may attempt to bake them some time.

I thought about how I don’t eat like that anymore. My favorite pizza is Papa Johns.

The poem was started.

This one took me a while to write. I let it marinate and kept adding to it. I thought about my childhood, who I see myself, who I am to others.

I wondered if who I was really worth mentioning. But I am. It is. I am both who I was and who I am now. And they’re both important.

Drop your this and that below so I can get to know you better!

Leave a comment

I’m a little bit of this and that

a little bit of homemade rolls and Papa Johns

a little bit of bluegrass and Lainey Wilson

a little bit of I Love Lucy and Game of Thrones

a little bit of mom and warrior

a little bit of romcom and mystery

a little bit of white hair and sun kissed blonde

a little bit of beach and mountains

a little bit of Chacos and block heels

I’m just a little bit of this and that

Leave a comment

Those kinds of thoughts really stunt any writing time that I happen to have. Instead of actually writing, I end up pulling up my “Writing Musings” document and spill my feelings, insecurities, questions, hopes. While the reflection is good, it’s taking away from writing something. When I don’t write something, I don’t feel like a writer.

In that “Writing Musings” document, I came up with some questions that I think are helping me streamline my thinking so that I can push forward on something. Whether I write poetry or fiction, I need to do something toward that goal.

Here are the questions that are helping me through my writing crisis.

1. If I wasn’t scared, what would I do?

2. If the only person I was worried about disappointing was me, what would I do?

3. Why do I want to write?

4. Where do I want to put my energy?

5. What makes me feel alive when I write?

6. What makes me feel like I’m making a difference?

7. What do I prefer to write?

8. If I wrote a mission statement for my writing, what would it be?

Maybe these are too many questions, maybe they’re not the right questions. But they are a place to start if you are feeling like me.

Which question resonated with you?

Leave a comment

When I started self-publishing, I had only known of Amazon and Barnes and Noble offering services. I put my books out there and leaned into their framework.

Then I did something embarrassing.

I asked an independent bookstore to stock my Amazon book.

I felt brave even asking. What I got in return was a kind but firm response.

“The margins in independent bookselling are so small that we can only consider books that are available from our wholesale distributor Ingram at standard publishing terms (~42% discount and fully returnable). We do not carry any books that are published through Amazon, nor do we purchase from Amazon or Barnes and Noble since they are not wholesalers, but our direct retail competitors.”

Yikes.

So, I pivoted to IngramSpark.

Here’s what I have learned.

1. You CAN actually sell books to bookstores.

My recent book wild & verdant has appeared in Barnes and Noble. They were able to invest in my book because it has a returnable policy. They purchased through IngramSpark, and my royalty came through the IngramSpark platform. It was nice to have everything centralized.

2. Barnes and Noble may be your only option.

Just because you can sell you book in bookstores does not mean that they will. You can query and ask, but unless you look in the bookstore, you probably won’t know if they actually bought it. But, I’ve received mostly “no” from independent booksellers.

3. IngramSpark book building has confused me.

This may just be a me thing. With Amazon, I felt that I could use the cover creator and book building platforms more easily than IngramSpark. When I tried using the IngramSpark one, there were so many different buttons and the text I uploaded didn’t look right at all. I’m sure with more finagling, I could have figured it out, but it wasn’t worth my time. I just tried to nail both the cover and book PDF and ordered a copy before releasing the book for publication.

4. You still need Kindle Create for your ebook.

Kindle Create is a fairly easy platform to use that I downloaded when I published through Amazon. You need Kindle Create to put together your ebook, which requires an EPUB file extension. Without it, your reader will not have an interactive experience with your ebook version, many of those readers using Kindle.

Self-publishing is a journey, and I’m glad I found the one that will set me up for success with getting my books in bookstores.

Please reach out if you ever have any questions!

Happy publishing!

P.S. My new book Socially Ambiguous is available anywhere you buy books on August 4. :)

Leave a comment

I know why the little dog barks

he barks because he isn’t little

he isn’t less brave than the German shepherd next to him

he has climbed mountains

he has slept in the toddler’s bed

he has fought for his scraps of leftovers

and won

he has noticed every person

who comes in a ten-foot radius of his home

he barks to make him seem bigger

to make him seem scarier

because he’s not just a cute little dog

he learned who he can trust early on

and you must earn that trust

before you see that he was rescued once

but never again

…

Based on our rescue dog, Joey.

Leave a comment

I have the distinct pleasure of owning a very old piano. It was my great-grandmother’s. My aunt had it and then gave it to me. It’ll stay in the family as long as we have people in the family.

This piano has moved three times within Colorado. Then, we moved it to D.C. It made it in one piece and sounds perfect. Apparently, old pianos and the time in dry temperatures has preserved the sound.

I love playing the piano. I’ve been playing since third grade, when I was deemed tall enough to reach the pedals. I’ve played in competitions and religious events, including one time in front of 5,000 people.

When I play the piano, I cannot play by ear. I cannot create extra notes that aren’t there. My runs are not good anymore. But I can play sheet music, and I have a few favorite songs by Yiruma and Michelle McLaughlin that I play on repeat.

Whenever I play piano, it’s while my kids are home. I don’t have a moment really when they’re not. So when I play, they want to play too. Both of my toddlers want to play too. That typically adds extra notes to “A River Flows in You.” But both come up and play.

One time, my daughter wanted to come up, and I put her on the bench in front of the high keys. I played an octave lower so that I could still get through it. When I got to the challenging refrain, she put her hands pretty close to where mine had been. I was surprised to see her play a single note like I had done.

She got tired of it fast and got down. That moment lingered. I had been a little frustrated with her because I just wanted to play the piano. But her playing those notes became precious. I realized the shortness of our time with this age again and held back my tears while I finished playing the piano song.

My kids are at the age of copying what I do, for good or bad. I’m trying to be a good example for them and seeing them trying to be like me reminds me of the large responsibility that is being a parent.

May my kids want to play piano and create music. May I be the role model that they need to become kind, good citizens.

Leave a comment

the piano from the 1900s

an heirloom has moved three times

retains tone and music

pull the bench from under the instrument

push back the wooden key cover

slowly to avoid a thump

my favorite piece to play is splayed out

as pages of a piano book

I get through the first page

when my daughter asks for up

I sigh inwardly and bring her up

to the high notes of the piano

I drop an octave to play

the arrangement of four notes or more

various types of notes

my fingers flying in recognition

then she tries to play where my hands are

I stop and let her play

pausing at the climax

she turns and looks at me after she plays

very good honey

when she slips down from the bench

before I return to the climax

I think about her playing where my hands were

I think she wanted to play like mommy

she put her hands where I put mine

she plunked keys like mommy does

how many things does she try to do like mommy

that I don’t take time to notice

that I should be more mindful of

Leave a comment

I hadn’t focused on writing in my twenties. I didn’t prioritize it. I didn’t think that I was good at it.

You never get good at something you don’t do.

September 2025, I decided that enough was enough. I either needed to get on it or quit. One quote I had read before (unfortunately, I don’t know who said it) said something to the effect of if you don’t know if you should write or not, quit. If you can’t stay quit, you should write.

I had tried to quit. It wasn’t working for me. So, I drafted wild & verdant, I started a Substack, and I created a writing Instagram account. I tried and grew as I figured out what I could reasonably manage with writing and what I could offer my readers.

I’m still working on all of those. I’m trying to connect with my audience, my readers. I have found amazing people who write beautiful things about my writing. These things make me smile. What makes me smile too is reading the beautiful things that others write and letting them know. People are so talented!

After writing wild & verdant, I published it, then republished it. I asked bookstores to stock it. I asked places if they could host an author event.

I saw wild & verdant in Barnes and Noble. A milestone that I didn’t realize I wanted until that smile and pride came from seeing my book on the shelf and signing those copies. Maybe, I’ve always wanted that, but I was afraid to admit it because it might not happen.

I have momentum. Then why do I want to put on the emergency breaks? Why do I want to evaluate it all and see what I want? I guess now, I have options. I have completed more than I ever envisioned. I’ve also not accomplished what I thought I would. At one point, I believed that a publisher would pick up my book and publish it, and I would be financially stable for the rest of my life as an author.

I think while those dreams have merit, they are not immediately practical. I look at what I have done, and writing is hard. Writing does not supplement a paycheck for most people. It’s something people believe in. It’s something that gives them joy. It’s something they’re willing to work hard for.

So, where do I go from here?

Maybe I’ll write more poetry and consider putting it as a business. Maybe I’ll self-publish more poetry books.

Maybe I will write that fiction book I never wrote. I found those comments from my writing portfolio. I reread the fiction comments. They said, “Strong revelation of characters, ideas, and theme. Make breaks between scenes more clear. Make dialogue more authentic by interweaving more action with it.” Totally doable. I totally agree too. My professors weren’t trying to discourage me. They were trying to steer me in the right direction. My perfectionist mind kept me from doing what I wanted to do.

I don’t know, but I think that I have to ride the momentum. I think I have to try and grow. It’s not try and fail if I’m doing something.

Leave a comment

the copper mines scar the view

circles of dirty going deep

into the earth

while the natural landscape boasts

canyons

trees

sage

rocks

mountains

in my sadness of the copper scar

I wonder if I use

an embarrassing amount of copper

in things I didn’t know had it

Leave a comment

When I hit 30, it unleashed a torrent of what is my aim, my goal, my purpose. I had read about that happening in books, but I didn’t expect it to happen! This led to a bit of an identity crisis. Who am I? Especially, am I a writer?

At this point, I had self-published three books and had nine poems published in magazines. But it wasn’t gaining the traction I wanted. The momentum wasn’t there. It was a hobby, not a passion. I think I wanted to prove to myself that I could use what I learned in college to get my writing out there. Where was I supposed to go from here?

Writing had been a childhood hobby, maybe passion. I wrote stories with my best friend, with my sister, just for me. My high school English teacher had us write a story every year. They weren’t great. But I was writing.

In college, I majored in professional writing and thought that I would write fiction books. After I completed my senior year, I had it in my mind that my fiction classes and writing classes in general did not go well. When I looked at my transcript, I realized that wasn’t the case. But what led to this feeling?

I had to write a writing portfolio as my culminating senior project. Three different anonymous teachers reviewed it and graded it. I did well. My portfolio reading went well. I got the comments back on my three required sections, Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Nonfiction subsets. One comment stood out among the rest, and it felt disheartening. Under Nonfiction: essays, there was the comment, “Your strongest area.”

I should have been excited. I found something that I’m good at. But it wasn’t what I wanted to write. I wanted to write fiction. I felt like I couldn’t now because it wasn’t my strongest. In fact, many things in my fiction stories had been labeled as unrealistic, dialogue and character interaction. Those comments weren’t wrong. I tried to add too much real life into those stories, and they overwhelmed the “suspension of disbelief.”

I took the lingering feeling of those comments and considered it “time to pivot” instead of “time to grow.”

So, I stopped writing fiction. I stopped writing during my master’s in English education. I became a wife. I became a teacher.

I wrote poetry and submitted it to magazines. I got several published but more rejections than publications. I applied then reneged on a serial fiction site. I started a book review blog then closed it out for good.

I went into a wilderness period between finding out I was pregnant and turning thirty. Suddenly, it felt like I needed to kick something into gear or I would turn fifty with regrets. One thing I don’t want to live with is regrets. I just needed to figure it out, do some deep soul diving and find a solution.

...

End of Part 1

Stick around for Part 2 next week

Leave a comment

light flashes then falls

over the dark sky

followed by the BOOM I feel

a delayed response only because light is faster than sound

so independence declared

was faster than

independence achieved

...

repost from last Fourth of July

Leave a comment

somewhere between size 9 and 10 shoes

you asked for Biscuit instead of Mr. Lion

the blanket stuffy you got as an infant

that you started sleeping with around one

couldn’t sleep without around 18 months

the animal we couldn’t leave home without

the one we had to keep track of

because there aren’t any more available online or in stores

now you want the dog we read books about

the one you say goes up, up, up the stairs

you weren’t talking when you held Mr. Lion to go to bed

you’d hide him somewhere

Daddy had to find him or you wouldn’t sleep

you didn’t believe that another version of Mr. Lion was worthy

but now it’s Biscuit

one day, it won’t be him either

I don’t ever want to get rid of them

but when you woke up early this morning

you were hugging Mr. Lion

Biscuit was still on the bed

we’re not done with this stage yet

I breathe out with relief

maybe you can be my baby just a little longer

Leave a comment

back when life was simple

it was complicated

feelings overwhelmed our nervous systems

but now we can name those emotions

we called it sad

instead of disappointed or upset

we called it happy

instead of elated or excited

we called it mad

instead of frustrated or annoyed

the complexity of childhood

feels simple through the lens of adulthood

but children won’t see that now

be patient as they learn too

Leave a comment

she mixed vintage with modern

combined colors I didn’t know could match

sometimes I would think

does what she is wearing really match

yes they did

in the light of her confidence that she walked with

she didn’t look hesitant

this just worked together

you just may not have realized it yet

she may have taught me one of my most important lessons

show up with confidence

be willing to take the risk

Leave a comment

Back in my high school days, I read several Jane Austen books - Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park. I hated all of them. I didn’t like the other options for my summer reading assignment, so I muddled through them.

The paragraphs were so long, like taking up an entire page. I read about a gazebo for over a page and the gazebo never appeared again. I couldn’t stand the books.

As a professional writing major in college, it was doubtful that I would go without reading something of Jane Austen. But thankfully (for me at the time), we read only one chapter, the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice. My teacher laughed. Out loud. While reading Jane Austen. I was shocked. How did she find this funny at all? Then, she reread us a section and pointed out the humor. That was the first time I thought, “Wow, maybe this is actually good.”

That same professor was doing a Jane Austen seminar. We had to attend two seminars a year, but I didn’t go to that one. In fact, many people who were asked if they were going responded the same way I did, “I hate Jane Austen.”

I went years without engaging with Jane Austen. No need for it. I graduated college, got my master’s, taught high school but no Jane Austen in the curriculum.

I came back to her on my own probably nine years after the first time I was told that Jane Austen is humorous.

I had gotten into the romance genre, but I needed something a little bit deeper than what I was reading. I love reading romance because I can escape. However, I needed a little break from that. At Barnes and Noble, I looked in the romance section, which was near the classics. I wondered if I should read the OG romance guru, Jane Austen. Try her books again. I picked up Northanger Abbey.

I read Northanger Abbey. I thought it was good. The first chapter captured my attention, and the plot propelled me through the next few chapters.

At chapter 5, I knew Jane Austen was good. She was explaining Catherine and Isabella’s friendship and how they were reading novels. Then she paused in the middle of the paragraph to defend the novel.

“Yes, novels; - for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performance, to the number of which they are themselves, adding” (Austen 2021, 26).

I laughed. Out loud. While reading Jane Austen.

I didn’t know what to do with myself, especially as she kept going. She defended the novel and the art thereof. In true Austen fashion, she says that a “young lady . . . lays down her book with affected indifference, - ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’; in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language” (Austen 2021, 27).

Uh, yeah, that says it all. If someone defends novels like that, I have to like them.

Now, I get to say, “I used to hate Jane Austen.”

We shall see where Sense and Sensibility leads me.

I would love to hear what you think of Jane Austen in the comments.

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. 2021. Northanger Abbey. New York: Union Square & Co.

Leave a comment

Art by IG @hannahtaylor_illustrates

I’ve been working on my next book called Socially Ambiguous. Here’s how it’s going.

1. The first draft is done! I’m very excited to have a pool of 70 poems to work with.

2. I’ve edited once.

3. The cover is completed.

4. I’ve rearranged the section titles and the poems within them.

Next, I’ll be working on writing a statement of who this book is for and edit my poems again to align with that statement.

Socially Ambiguous is a collection of poetry highlighting the introvert who feels vulnerable in social settings but is determined to be a part of them and needs to find the compromise between the two.

Coming Fall 2026.

Leave a comment