The Short Story of Me

A lot of things look okay on the surface. High-achieving suburban school districts with “a tradition of excellence”, student parking lots filled with fancy cars, and college acceptances broadcast across the chests of fleece-lined sweatshirts.

But I’m more interested in what kids are learning between classes, what drives them, and the hearts underneath the names of those universities. I believe kids have ideas they’re rarely given the chance to explore. I believe kids are secretly making things—out of words, wood, paint, clay, or anything they can get their hands on. And I believe more kids live closer to the cracks in our perfect towns than we realize.

I was one of those kids. You wouldn’t have known it from my grades, my activities list, or my happy, shiny smile. But I had stories to tell, and it was stories that kept me from falling through cracks that threatened to swallow me.

The Easy to Skim Version

Publishing
     More Chinese, short story, Mei Magazine, 2011
     Dark Room, play, Paul Green Playwrights National Competition Finalist, 2000
     NCTE Database of Rationales for Challenged Books, 1998

Educational Experience
     M.A. Educational Theatre, New York University, New York
          August 1998, GPA 4.0/4.0
     B.S. Communications Education, Miami University, Oxford, OH
          May 1994, GPA 3.9/4.0
     Teaching Certification:
          English, Speech, Communications (7-12), Reading (K-12), Gifted-Talented (K-12)

Young Adult Novels
     In Process :  LIVE EDGE, DARK ROOM, GOLDEN BEAR
Complete: GHOSTWRITERS

Workshops & Conferences

Listen In with Nina LaCour and Elana K. Arnold, Spring 2025
Revision Season with Elana K. Arnold, Spring 2024
Slow Novel Lab with Nina LaCour, Winter 2019
     Highlights Whole Novel Workshop with Sarah Aronson, August 2015
     Fire in Fiction with Donald Maass, January 2013
     Children's Book Writing Intensive with Laurie Halse Anderson, October 2012
     Highlights Founders Workshop with Patti Lee Gauch, October 2010
     Revision 911 Workshop with Cynthea Liu, April 2010
     Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, January 2010
     Starting a Writing Group with Nita Sweeney, January 2007

Teaching Experience

Gifted English Language Arts, Grade 5, 2018-2025
Barrington, Tremont, Wickliffe, & Windermere Elementaries, Upper Arlington, OH
     Gifted English Language Arts, Grades 7-8, 2020-2021
Hastings & Jones Middle Schools, Upper Arlington, OH
Freshman Language and Composition, Grade 9, 2016-2017
          Upper Arlington High School, Upper Arlington, OH
     Gifted & Talented Integrated Studies, Grades 2-5, 2012-2013
          Greensview Elementary School, Upper Arlington, OH
     Language Arts, Grades 6-7, 2001-2003
          Columbus Jewish Day School, Columbus, OH
     AP Language & Composition, Grades 9-12, 1998-2001
          Worthington Kilbourne High School, Worthington, OH
     Gifted & Talented Language Arts, Grades 7-8, 1995-1998
          McCord Middle School, Worthington, OH
     Writing-Reading Workshop, Grade 8, 1994-1995
          Norwood Middle School, Norwood, OH

Membership
     Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, 2009-present

My Journey as a Writer

Pale green, lined newsprint and fat, soft-leaded Ticonderoga pencils were my favorite thing about the old, brick, Long Island school building. I counted myself as just another writer on the pastel-colored globe my teacher kept on her desk, right in there with Beverly Cleary and Shakespeare.  I mean, my teacher did have me recopy my poem, Books Can Take You All Over, onto a giant piece of pink construction paper which she hung on the wall.

By the time my family moved to Ohio, graduated from high school, and arrived on campus at Miami University, I could write a mean five-paragraph essay.  I was very good at writing about other people’s writing.  I was, however, horrified to find I’d been closed out of The Art of the Essay and put in Creative Writing!  Thank God my professor, Steven Bauer, reintroduced me to the creative girl I’d left back in first grade.

However, I remained dedicated to becoming a teacher. From day one I plastered a giant pencil across each classroom that read: Everyone has something to say. I believed in my students’ stories and their right and need to tell them. I spent years learning to teach them HOW to write. Stories, I told them, are power. Stories are how you help readers step into someone else’s life, feel it, and leave irrevocably changed. Of course, I was teaching myself.

During the summers, I earned a masters degree in Educational Theatre at New York University, devising interactive process dramas to help students engage with the world. It felt like play and imagination, and it taught me what I loved about theater was making stories. I filled drawers with four terrible novels, earned one playwriting award, published one short story, attracted a handful of agents’ requests for full manuscripts. I sought out classes taught by authors I admired. I poured through craft books, tore apart novels to learn how stories are built, and published my first story.

Retired from teaching, I am developing a set of three companion novels; about anger, art, and anxiety; about searching out the missing pieces of your story, looking into dark rooms, and becoming. I am giving the girl inside me who loves to make things the chance to test herself. Soon I will be searching for a creative partnership with an agent who believes in me, and one day I hope to visit readers with interactive presentations using process drama. For now, every day, as my teacher Elana K. Arnold would say, I OBSERVE. What did I make? QUESTION. Am I satisfied? And LEAN IN. How can I make this work harder?

I am looking to break my heart wide open.

adapted from Holly McGhee’s speech, There Is No GPS