This year, 2016, I will be gaining a sense of rhythm in my life. The rhythm of movement/exercise into my weeks. The rhythm of a daily writing schedule. Learning to listen to the rhythms of sound, nature, love. I want to find rhythm, a delicate balance, woven between my days. I want to understand what Virginia Woolf understood when she wrote about the rhythm of the sea. I want the cottonwool to be lifted and to see and feel the world deeply again. These are my simple hopes for the year to be. I don’t make resolutions. I don’t set unrealistic goals. I simply declare that this is the year of health, creativity and love. I may even create a rhythm journal this year. More about that one in a separate post. 


On another note, this blog will begin to have interviews talking about their creative lives sometime in mid-January.

If you have one, what is your word of the year?

I just finished producing, writing, and editing and 14-page annual report for NAMI-CT, an organization which serves support, education and policy for mental health populations. Here are the steps I took to produce an annual report that told their story.

1. Interview key leaders, volunteers, and donors about why they are involved in your organization
2. Craft a short story in a few paragraphs for each interview. Make sure you have photographs to go with each story. Either use ones on file or take fresh ones.
3. Write the welcome letter from your executive director in such a way where it highlights all events and what metrics they produced for your service area. Use a friendly, conversational tone as if writing a blog post. 
4. Edit all content submitted by board of directors, lists of donors in drop files that will go right to the graphic designer, financial statements in Excel files. 
5. Break down the areas your organization supports into sections and write a few paragraphs about major achievements that year for each section.
6. Make sure your designer understands your mission, your creative concept, and any tag lines  agreed upon by your executive director.

I'm available to consult, produce, write, and edit your next annual report. Click here to contact me.

Do you like poetry? Have you lost a friend to illness, accident, or suicide?

​I wrote Brooklyn’s Song a few years after losing a close friend to suicide. My friend was a talented poet and artist who suffered with manic depression. This novella is a quick but lovely read. Written in lyric free verse to sound like a teen’s journal entries, you will most likely re-read and highlight your favorite passages of poetry. I meant it as a companion to your soul as you heal from grief. The book will appear on Amazon in a few weeks. Hopefully, some time in early 2016. I originally wrote the story under another name and self-published it. But thanks to meeting with some literary agents and a book designer, I took their advice and decided to re-edit and redesign it. Subsequently, a new title came forth during this process. I will keep you posted on when and how you can order copies of Brooklyn’s Song. Go to my Books page for more information about it.

​Order it here!