The moment of clarity came when I was twelve.
Mrs. Chen, my English teacher in Singapore, shared a paragraph I had written with the class as an example of a strong opening.
In blue fountain pen ink, I had written: “To see an SBC bus during rush hour traffic is to see it at its worst.”
Her response to that small, insignificant sentence planted a seed. There was something I was doing—something in the way I arranged words on paper—that made them stand out.
That’s when I knew I wanted to be a writer.
I was at my first writing job in Singapore when my brother called to tell me our mother had been in an accident. Four months later, I was in graduate school in Ohio, trying to make sense of a life that had shifted overnight.
My mother’s death, and the isolation of being oceans away from everything I knew, led me to the first pages of a story I would continue returning to for years.
Graduate school eventually led me to an internship at Working Woman magazine in New York City. It was the kind of opportunity I had dreamed about, and I wasn’t ready to leave.
I stayed in the United States, finished my degree, and began a career in journalism. News writing taught me discipline, precision, and how to strip a story down to what mattered.
Over the years, life filled in around the writing. I married, became a mother, and built a career that took me from newspapers and magazines to corporate communications.
I was still writing, of course. But for a long time, I was writing for everyone but myself.
Eventually, the questions I had spent years setting aside began to ask for my attention. I returned to personal writing and discovered that the work I had once thought I wanted to do—and the life I had actually lived—were beginning to meet.
The essays that followed led me back through questions of family, faith, identity, and belonging.
Today, I write personal essays and creative nonfiction exploring identity, belonging, family, and the stories we inherit. My work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, CutBank, HerStry, and others.
The Space Between, my forthcoming memoir, grew out of the questions and stories I had been carrying for much of my life.
I live in Georgia with my husband, Brad. I’m the mother of one grown daughter, and between us, we have three grown children. I still make lists, collect recipes, and believe some of life’s most interesting questions take decades to answer.