About

I have enjoyed returning to Cambridge in the spring, a bastion of learnedness that I could only enjoy more if I didn’t have so much darn school work.  It’s really a lovely place If you haven’t been there, I would encourage a visit.

So even though I have taken this time off to catch up on a few projects, and even though I promised loved ones that I would take a step back from a jammed-packed somewhat exhausting summer in Barcelona, I have started a blog that began as a resource for my tutoring clients and has evolved into an outlet for my love of writing – the cogency of ideas embedded in stories, the sensual delight of poetry, the beauty of text on the page, and the fascinating logic of linguistics and semiology. Now, the first thing I will say about writing is that, that last sentence is horrible. Discursive. Maudlin, even.  And I know you are thinking:  ”this woman can’t write!”  Well.  Harvard thought differently.  And so did my forth grade teacher who had my poem “The Sky” published in an anthology of children’s poetry in the 1995 (Anthology of Poetry by Young Americans ®, Volume X, p. 62 if you were interested), you should probably stop being so closed minded and read on.  I’ll try to keep the sentence lengths under control from here on out.

The important parts of my writing story begin with a co-written lassie-influenced play where a mute girl miraculously gains the power to speak when an injured friend’s life hangs in the balance (as a result of falling off of a dog-house roof – I was eight when I wrote this) and ends with a self-consciously clever blog about the the joys of parallelism as a rhetorical device and the latest “A Way with Words” podcast about new campus slang. In the time between these two momentous writing endeavors, I studied English and architecture at the University of Virginia and earned a Bachelor of Science degree.  Then I went on to earn a Master of Architecture degree at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte before beginning a two-year teaching fellowship where I instructed classes on architectural design, writing and representation.  And what, might you ask, about teaching college full-time with adoring students and flexible weekdays and subsidized healthcare would possess me to go back to school again?!?  As my local NPR station likes to remind me, I am a lifelong learner.  So, I am back in graduate school and on schedule to finish my Masters of Landscape Architecture degree at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in December of 2012.  As I alluded to, I have taken this fall as a sort of ‘sabbatical’ to catch up on design and writing projects, help out with family and enjoy the town I grew up in near Hartford, Connecticut.

It’s worth mentioning – because it’s the coolest thing that’s happened to me lately – that I got an internship working at an architecture firm in Barcelona, Spain, this past summer.  It’s one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been and if you meet me in person, I am liable to bring it up in the first 15 seconds of our conversation.  Sorry about that, it was just a really exciting place to live; especially if you’re someone whose interested in architecture and landscape architecture and fine art and delicious food and nice people and beautiful beaches and bright colors and talented street performers and fancy wedge heels and good gelato and nice people.  Also, they have cute shoes.

In addition to the blog’s header image, here are some photos from BCN:

See how this whimsical city of brightly colored tiles and red velvet buildings has taught me to not take myself too seriously?  Spain was a perfect remedy to my first year at Harvard.

Speaking of traveling, I have spent a few seasons in Europe and, as most people who have spent time abroad will say, it has effected the way that I look at things.  I spent one summer in Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands.  My sister and her husband were living in Berlin and were kind enough to let me use their apartment as a sort of European home base.

I read A Moveable Feast, of course, as I was on my way to Paris and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own on the way back to Berlin.

Aside from this past summer in Spain, this backpacking-plus-sister-visit was the last time I was in Europe.

Before that, in college, I studied in Vicenza, Italy (where I learned to draw) and in a small village in Provence, France (where I learned to dance).  It’s more difficult to dig up these photos, now,  seven years later, but one I did find is from a town, Rousillion, where red-umber soil was mined for its pigment for centuries before synthetic dies were prevalent. The extraction of colored earth has left an enormous canyon beside a small but dense town center.  In the picture below you can see the packed earth between stones that make up the wall supporting a set of stairs.

I have found that the correlation between building and soil color tends to indicate local materials and/or a historical structure.  When I taught in College Station (TX) one summer, I noticed right away that the buildings are all made of sandy-colored bricks like the sandy soil typical of that part of the state.  In my hometown in Connecticut many of the buildings are made of a local red sandstone and in St. Louis, MO (where my person lives and goes to school) there is a distinct red brick color particular to Missouri.  These bricks are typical of that mid-western modern architecture (a la Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Sullivan) and so valuable that people crash into abandoned brick buildings in St. Louis and steel the bricks that fall loose.  I like to think that material and color tie the fabric of the land and the buildings together.

Because I have loved all my trips to Europe – each at least two months in length – I wanted to encourage anyone out there looking to hire a young, promising writer or designer for their welcoming atelier composed of bilingual creative-minded darlings, to please drop me a line.  Starting January of 2013, I am very available.  🙂