This piece started to take shape when it was my turn to drive. My husband pulled into a rest area so we could switch. When I was settled behind the wheel, he made some funny…
Category: Published
Published: Oh Reader
Grief and growth take center stage in The Third Mushroom, a middle-grade novel by the talented Jennifer L. Holm that serves as a follow-up to The Fourteenth Goldfish, a book I shared with my first…
Published: Grief Isn’t Always Center Stage
Long ago I worked as the first communications director for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. I love coffee and I loved living in Vermont’s capital, Montpelier, but I didn’t love the job. I spent hours writing…
Published: Ticket to Ride
When Shutterfly landed in my inbox in December 2020, I felt assaulted by their cheery message to “push rewind” and relive memories from a family trip nearly a decade ago. So many of us are…
Published: Creating a Grief & Growth Notebook
The process I learned to help clients who’d experienced sexual assault reframe their trauma became an important feature of my own healing 17 years later when I lost my teenaged son to suicide. I call…
Published: Omissions
I started writing Omissions after a real-life examination of my faculty bio on my school’s website midyear into a new teaching position. My sixth-grade students were to profile a faculty member of their choice, but…
Published: What a Children’s Book Taught Me (and My Students) About Grief
Michelle Cuevas’s powerful children’s book, The Care and Feeding of a Pet Black Hole, features prominently in my essay about navigating grief while preparing for my new role as an English teacher at North Country…
Published: What’s Your Grief – Books & Broken Hearts
The website What’s Your Grief published a piece I wrote this summer. It highlights three contemporary middle-grade books that are ideal for facilitating meaningful conversations and classroom activities about trauma, grief, and loss with students.…