About

Welcome Friends!

I see Stories & Thyme as a place dedicated to learning and sharing about how to make room in our lives for creativity.

I believe that a full and abundant life includes creativity.   I also believe that creativity thrives in a life that intentionally pursues wholeness.

I see eight overlapping spheres where we can pursue wholeness and creativity: how we pray (liturgically and spontaneously), how we read (great books), how we order (our time and space), how we make (beautiful creations), how we move (our bodies), how we eat (nutritionally–dense food), we connect (with our communities), and how we rest (pausing and sleeping).

These are lessons I’ve been learning since I left a PhD program about a decade ago to become a writer. Yet, in other ways, my childhood was full of these elements. My heart has always been about expressing and living fully in God’s created goodness.

Today my life is filled with making times for these practices and caring for those in my charge.  I am a part of a local Anglican Church. I am married to Evan, a thoughtful and kind a middle school teacher year at a Christian private school in Pewaukee. We have two sweet little kids Jackson and Lily, who live with us in our very small house in Milwaukee that we’ve named “Blue Spruce Cottage” that we bought after moving from Maryland where we did graduate school and then tutored middle and high schoolers in SAT English, and cared for our godson Corin and our sweet friends’ baby Susana.

When I’m not blogging, walking, changing diapers, cooking, or reading a Newbery, I am writing a children’s fantasy novel. This is the most fun and rewarding work I have ever done. I cannot believe that I get to sit down (or stand up!) during the little one’s nap time and create. My work draws on a lot of medieval myths, so lately I’ve been using my expensive master’s degree in Early Modern European history to do research.  It has been a beautiful experience of seeing much of what I cultivated before come to fruition now.

It’s slow work, and making room for my novel to grow is like caring for an herb garden. It needs constant attention so it isn’t choked out by business or fatigue. But I find, and I hope that you’ll find as well, that when we consistently make time to pursue wholeness and beauty all of lives benefit.