I was born and raised in North Haven, Connecticut, and attended college in Philadelphia. Many of my stories are inspired by my work as a registered nurse in a suburban New Jersey community hospital. While working there, I earned my MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark, where I taught English Composition for many years. My interests in medicine, health, and writing have come together in my current role as fiction editor for the narrative medicine journal The Intima.
Since I was a child, I’ve found reading novels both satisfying and moving and an education too, whether because they bring me to a particular time or place, teach me about a vocation or skill, or simply show me how other human beings think, feel and behave. But could I write one myself? Reading a novel and writing one once seemed as far apart as listening to music is from composing a symphony.
Georges Seurat’s ability to compose a scene completely in tiny dots, the singular focus of a baseball outfielder reaching up to snag a fly ball, Broadway actors performing the same show night after night with the same energy — all of these demonstrate the same devotion, patience and focus that I strive to bring to my writing that a painter brings to brushwork and composition, an athlete to training and agility, and an actor to memorizing lines and inhabiting a character.
