Reading The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz in high school fueled my adventurous spirit, leading many years later to my accomplishments as a long-distance hiker, spending months backpacking in the wild. After high school, I graduated from West Chester State University with my B.A. degree in education going on to work with elementary students often using story to enhance concepts. Twenty-five years later it was time for a change; pursue my dream as a storyteller attending East Tennessee State University where I earned a master’s degree. Along the way I attended the Whole Language Umbrella Conferences in Winnipeg, San Diego, and other cities, and taught a workshop for educators at the Imaginative Education Institute at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Life circumstances took me to Ocracoke Island off the Outer Banks of North Carolina, then onto the mountains in the western part of the state where I joined the Highlands Community Theater group, directing How the Other Half Loves, by Alan Ayckbourn, and acting in Parallel Lives and other productions.

My storytelling performances spring directly from my own experiences, or subjects related to them, like my motor scooter journey in Thailand; swimming with dolphins in the Bimini Sea; traveling across Haiti on a rickety bus; hiking up the 14,500-foot Mt. Whitney, and climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia. If I’m not hiking or telling stories, you might find me sitting at a vegetarian café, teaching ESL in South Korea, riding the California Zephyr train from San Francisco to Chicago, sipping a green tea Frappuccino at Starbucks, or watching my favorite movie Beverly Hills Cop for about the thirty-seventh time.