about me.

A few basics about me: I was born in 1963 a few months before John F Kennedy was elected president, five years before the Civil Rights Act was passed, and 12 years before the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, a legal ending of the forced assimilation and disappearance that defines the United States. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and then in rural Ohio, lived for some years in a three-generation household with my mother and brother, grandparents and great grandparents and now live in Minneapolis, MN. The majority of my people crossed the Atlantic from Italy, Germany and Ireland in the late 19th century and while there are complexities and nuances here, I identify as - and feel responsibility as - a white woman who was raised working class, is queer and is a mother.

I love the Midwest, like fiercely loyally love the Midwest and particularly this land of the Great Lakes Basin and have mostly always lived here minus seven years in Bristol, England and small periods in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I spent a lot of time hitchhiking and traveling in my 20s, meaning I stayed for three or four months in a lot of different places, but I have been happily settled on these Dakota lands for over 35 years.

In January 2025, I completed a walk from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast of Turtle Island. I had been dreaming of this walk since I was 16 and started the walk in my 60th year. If you are curious about what this means, you can read more here or download the book where I’ve written a lot of words about it. Similarly, I posted a number of pieces on the blog on this site as well as through Instagram and Facebook. I am currently writing a book about the walk and what I learned and am in conversation with a publisher for a potential August 2027 publication date. plan to be walking again in 2027.

I work as a body-based practitioner (a craniosacral therapist (and don’t trust the Wikipedia page about this modality) who is trained in scores of other body-based teachings), a cultural worker and writer. I also am part of two different organizations that I helped form: Healing Histories Project and Relationships Evolving Possibilities. I just reopened a virtual form of my practice and you can find out more about this in my “work with me” page.

In the “culture work” category, I do a range of types of work that find me through relationship and history. I call it “culture work” because most of the time that is what it looks like: being in supportive conversations focused on aligning what we believe and value with the day-to-day activities of survival. I have years of work in nonprofits including three years sharing leadership of a community foundation. I have cofounded and run a local newspaper and been an editor for a queer community arts journal. I have a shit ton of experience in that thing called fundraising, but which is just about supporting communities so that our material conditions are met within a violently unequal economic system. And finally, I have years of supporting and navigating interpersonal and organizational conflict, mentoring/coaching (whatever the word is for when you are invited to spend intimate time with someone who wants to learn from you) different shapes of people, and teaching/facilitating content on our individual and collective relationship to our bodies, the land-which-is-our-bodies, and the histories that shape us.

My books are: Queerly Classed, which was first published in 1996 and is now open source on my website, Restricted Access: On Lesbians in Disability which I published in 1997 with Victoria Brownworth and is now out of print, Liberated to the Bone, which was published in 2022 as part of the Emergent Strategy Series at AK Press, and At the Fork on the Road, self-released in 2024, which I wrote about the walk before I actually took the walk.

I regularly write pieces on this website under “blogs” and also share writing through Patreon. If you are interested, you can join my Patreon starting at $5 a month. This is where I share notes, pieces from the upcoming book and chunks of essays that are in process - and a lot of gratitude.

I am clear that anything I do is done because of what I have learned and experienced from others. My teachers and mentors are too numerous to mention but you will see them referred to in all of my writing and speaking. Click here for a list of other sites that I love. Some of them are included there.