Who I Am
And What This is About

Any of my friends will tell you that I like to talk. I make sense of my life by turning it into stories. As long as I have been able to hold a pencil, I've been trying to use words to make meaning out of my experiences.

Throughout high school and college, I focused on poetry, writing almost exclusively free verse. It wasn't until my early twenties, when I learned to play the guitar, that I started to write songs. I joke that I am a poet, who picked up the guitar so that people would listen to me (there's not nearly as much of an audience for poetry as there should be). Music was always a part of my life, though. It just simmered on the back burner for several years.

After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1999, I spent two years teaching English with the Peace Corps in Far Eastern Russia. I told Yelena, the Russian teacher supervising me, that I liked to sing and would like to teach our students English songs. Never a person to miss an opportunity, Yelena set about finding me a guitar teacher so that I could accompany our students in local talent shows.

Photo by Laura Seeley

Despite the language barrier (I had only been learning Russian for 2 months when we met) my teacher, Oleg, managed to teach me the basics of the guitar. It turned out to be a blessing, since two years as the only native English speaker in a town 10,000 miles from home gave me a lot of time alone with myself. I spent some of that time figuring out who I'd become, and trying to make sense of the things that had happened to me so far. Songwriting was my main creative outlet during that time.

My songwriting started with canabalizing old poems. "Laugh First" was my first song, based on a poem I wrote my senior year of college. "Without Words" is another example of this, and "Waterlilies" has actually changed very little from its original poetic form.

I jumped into live performance very soon after picking up the guitar, because Russian culture demands that you not be shy about demonstrating your talents. My first solo performance was at the Silver Strings Guitar Competition in Kavalerovo. After returning from Russia, I was ready to try out American venues.

I have been playing my songs on the pub, coffee house, and open mic circuit since fall 2001, starting with the (now sadly defunct) Urban Word in Trenton, NJ, and Caffe Lena in my home state of New York. I now live in Somerville, MA, and I've been in the Boston area since 2002. Somerville has a great music community, and I really appreciate all the feedback and support I've gotten from fellow songwriters, especially at The Burren in Davis Square. You can often find me on Tuesday nights, at the open mic hosted by Hugh McGowan.

My songs, as you'll probably notice, are in the tradition of confessional poetry. They are about things that have happened to me or to people I know, and they are my way of trying to learn something from what life throws at me. I worked for about a year at a residential treatment center for disturbed adolescent girls. I was honored to help some of the students there turn their poems and thoughts into songs. It brought home what a powerful experience it can be to make meaning through art and communicate that new understanding to others. I hope that you find something in my songs that makes you say, "Yes, I know exactly what you mean." If you do, I'd love to hear about it.

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