Who I Am
I was born and grew up in eastern Iowa in towns along the Mississippi River, Clinton and Camanche, respectively. My parents divorced when I was seven; along with my younger brother, I was raised by my mother. We lived in a mobile home below the poverty level, but my queen-of-budgeting mother made sure we had clothes to wear, food to eat, and special birthdays and holidays.
My writing career originally sparked when I was three years old
and my mom would tell me the letters to write to make the
words to send my grandmother letters. It continued when
I was about five and thought I was writing a song with
the lyrics “I’m on top of the world looking down on creation.”
Imagine my disappointment when I heard “Top of the World” by
The Carpenters on the radio. It really took hold at about ten
years old when I caught the writing bug after a school assignment.
From that moment, I was either writing or thinking I should be writing.
Upon graduating from high school, I had amassed enough scholarship awards to pay for half of my college education and started the following fall at Iowa State University. I graduated from Iowa State University with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Community and Regional Planning with Honors and Distinction in May 1996. As part of my honors program, I took creative writing classes to fulfill my humanities requirements.
Upon arriving in DeKalb, Illinois, in September 1996 with my husband,
I got a job in a local law office typing from dictation for four hours each
weekday. In 1997, I got a job in the community and regional planning
field but found I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did working at the law firm,
so in December 2000, I started the Paralegal Certificate
program at Elgin Community College, finishing in December 2001.
In April 2001, I moved to Davenport, Iowa, and began working as a Paralegal for a prominent local law firm. I loved my job for several years. My services quickly became in demand and I was soon working almost exclusively for the most senior partner at the firm. I enjoyed researching, interviewing, and gathering facts to write position statements for business clients involved in civil rights claims. I worked on numerous personal injury cases, including medical malpractice and asbestos litigation representing multiple clients.
When the attorney I had been working with retired and a friend
from work was diagnosed with breast cancer, I asked myself
if something happened to me where I was removed |
from living or at least prohibited from participating in life
for a long period of time, “What would I leave undone?”
That answer and my experience with my growing preteen daughter
and the friends in her scout troop led me to publish
Crush and Other Love Poems for Girls in 2008.
My interest in writing as a profession grew. I completed a young adult novel manuscript, started another, and began thinking about how I could earn a living from writing. When another friend at work died from colon cancer twenty years to the day after I’d lost my almost two-year-old cousin to a car accident, I decided it was time to jump in. So I did in January 2010.
I won the Bettendorf Public Library’s Love Poem Contest in early 2012.
Since then I have published two additional poetry collections –
The Other Side of Crazy and Versed in Nature: Hiking Northwest
Illinois and East Iowa State Parks; five novels – Missing Emily: Croatian
Life Letters, Melody Madson – May It Please the Court?, Taming the Twisted,
Taming the Twisted 2 Reconstructing Rain, and Shattered Pearl; and one
non-fiction book – Book Marketing Basics: The 5 Ps. During this time,
I also returned to school, first for a marketing certificate from
Scott Community College and then the University of Iowa
from which I received my MBA in December 2014.
I enjoyed publishing so much that I opened my own traditional publishing company, Legacy Book Press LLC, in January 2020 which releases books of personal stories told via non-fiction, autobiographical fiction, poetry, or a combination. In the spring of 2020 with the pandemic well underway, my kids graduating high school, and my publishing company getting started, I began summarizing and evaluating medical records for a small law firm near my home on a freelance basis, which I greatly enjoyed until September 2021 when my publishing company was getting busier and I stepped away. It was during this time that I discovered my passion for traveling alone (I’d already known I loved to travel), having spent a couple of weeks two consecutive winters in Gulf Shores, Alabama; a week in Door County, Wisconson; numerous shorter trips to closer locales; and a major road trip from Iowa to Oregon and back on my quest to visit all 50 states before November 16, 2023. The summer of 2022 found me undergoing a major life change, so I decided it was time to marry my love of litigation and writing to once again make myself available for freelance paralegal work.
