As a child growing up in the Midwest, I was captivated by stories about pioneers on the Oregon Trail and the homesteaders in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series. Both their adventures and their everyday lives hooked me in — the food, the traditions, the family bonds, the lives lived close to nature. I couldn’t get enough of such stories!

These American stories inspired to start my own neighborhood newspaper at age 11…to work on my high school and college newspapers…to tape an interview with my grandmother in 1977 (my first oral history)…and to earn a degree from Grinnell College in American Studies, an interdisciplinary field that integrates American history, literature, and folk culture. In 1981, I walked across the United States, a 3,500-mile adventure.

Since then, I have worked for many nonprofit organizations and public figures on both coasts, often in an administrative role, but also as a writer and editor. In addition to publishing many freelance articles of my own on a variety of subjects (see, for example, “Living Democracy,” from YES! magazine), I have collaborated on books about civic life and ecological sustainability with authors Frances Moore Lappé and Fritjof Capra. I am also a part-time public health educator and counselor, with a specialty in HIV/AIDS.

In all my writing, interviewing, and counseling work, I've found that I genuinely enjoy listening to people talk about their authentic, true-to-life experiences, both the mundane and the exalted. It became my dream to create a business through which I could help them save their memories in oral and written form.

In 1998, I discovered the national Association of Personal Historians, for which I am now the Northern California co-coordinator, and formed First Person Narratives. I have worked with a variety of fascinating clients, crafting elegantly designed memoirs and heirloom legacy books from audiotaped interviews.

In addition, I have volunteered my time on several community history projects, documenting the lives and experiences of the Bay Area’s diverse populations. (See, for example, my profiles of homeless seniors.)

I love helping my clients document their life experiences — the smells, the sights, the tastes, the pains, the joys, even the quiet times — for the benefit of themselves and their descendants. The more people I meet, the more I am convinced of Mark Twain’s assertion:

There was never yet an uninteresting life.
Such a thing is an impossibility.
Inside of the dullest exterior
There is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.