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My father was a librarian, and I grew up surrounded by books.  It was not an uncommon occurrence for my family to gather around books in the same way many families gathered around the television: each of us with a book under the nose, immersed in a far off land.  The stories I read set fire to my imagination, and I spent hours scribbling stories, poems and essays in blank hardbound journals and on loose pieces of paper.

It eventually became clear that I would combine this love of reading and writing with my family’s career legacy: education.  My father was a teaching librarian.  My mother was a teacher.  Her mother was a teacher.  It seemed only natural that I, too, would follow that path, not to mention the nerdy thrill I would get with each opportunity to declare, “I am a teacher, like my father before me….”

I began my career as an educator in the fall of 2000, retiring from the formal classroom in 2007 to raise my children at home.  While the vocation of wife and now homeschooling mother has been immensely rewarding, I enjoy sharing my passion for reading and writing with students and their families.  Founding The Writing Well in the fall of 2008 has allowed me to do this.  For the past nine years, I have taught students from grade three through the university level in individual, group and classroom settings.  I have sixteen years of experience in teaching students of all ability levels, including ELL, gifted and talented, learning disabled and twice exceptional (my own child included).  I am a Teacher Consultant for the Northern Virginia Writing Project and a blogger at Not So Formulaic; my writing has appeared in La Leche League’s New Beginnings Magazine, The Journal of the Northern Virginia Writing Project, Flourish in Hope, Catholic Mommy Blogs and Catholic365.