Long Story Short

Hello there curious person. Do I know you? Do you know me? I see that you have dug deeper, looking for the woman behind the writing. Well done. Here’s the long and short of me.

I am a mother, wife, gardener, obsessive home cook, outdoor educator, amateur naturalist, potter and writer. I have tried not to be a writer, for many reasons (not least of which, I am so many other things!) but it keeps cropping up again, so here I am. 

I love to write about gardening and cooking, overthought treatises on the most mundane of things. This simple journaling of practical experiences in the tangible world helps me feel grounded and steady. But I also love writing about life, and all the hardships herein. I love using words to untangle the many snarly bits of being a human. I love picking my thoughts apart, looking for patterns, and sharing with you.

I tried writing for just myself. There are some inherent problems with writing for an audience, feeling tied to an image and an outcome and whatnot. I thought maybe I could get around that ego catch by writing to not-an-audience. But, it hasn’t worked. Writing for not-an-audience is not satisfying. I write because I am fascinated by communication. I am amazed every time that I can hitch up my brain to a line of words and at the other end, you can hitch your brain up, and for a few moments we are connected. How truly magical. 

Writing is a very small part of my life though. I am first and foremost a mama and a wife. I live with my family in Eugene, Oregon on a ¼ acre lot in a friendly neighborhood, surrounded by all that a small-sized city has to offer. Our kids have become teenagers of late, to no one’s surprise more than our own. I did the bulk of the parenting for the first six years and although I genuinely consider myself lucky to have been able to stay home with our kids, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I do not miss full-time parenting of small children. 

For a “profession” I work as an outdoor nature educator. I never set out to be a teacher, and never would have believed it had you told me earlier in life. But sometimes unlikely things happen and you find they are unexpectedly enjoyable. I have done many things for money over the years, and hope to keep building my eclectic resume until I’m old enough to regret not making a career that provided retirement plans.

Throughout all of this, gardening and more generally homesteading, have been constant themes. In Alaska where I grew up and then became an adult, carving my niche into the world, I was all about “subsistence.” This is a word without any coherent or consistent meaning outside of Alaska, and there is nothing it translates into either. Outside of Alaska the word implies a threadbare existence, eeking out a living in a hardscrabble sense. But subsistence in Alaska is a joyful thing, a respected path. It means living in a way that is connected to the Earth, dependent on the generosity of nature. It encompasses hunting, fishing and harvesting the bounty of the wilderness, but also gardening, DIY and making your homestead. I did all these things until we moved to Eugene in 2016. 

Here and now, I have tried to keep up the spirit of subsistence by creating a huge permaculture garden on our ¼ acre lot. I threw myself into the work as a way of ammeliorating the sadness of loss after our move. I told myself if I couldn’t have a freezer full of salmon and moose, I was going to grow a goddamn peach tree. And I did. Our yard was a blank slate when we bought this house, and through sweat and tears I have turned most of it into garden beds full of fruit trees, vegetables, herbs, native plants and what I call my “old lady flowers.” It is a minature Garden of Eden just as I’d hoped, beautiful and abundant, and even though (like all good things) my emotional relationship with “the simple life” is complicated, it grounds my life and nourishes my soul. 

And so you may find me writing about any and all of these things. I like to imagine my life in chapters, and I have organized this site into discreet chunks accordingly. Click through the tabs to go back in time. My writerly life started with a zine titled Subsist/Resist. For a short time, the zine became a blog, both of which are a perfect snap shot of my 20-something self. In my 30s I entered a new chapter as a mother, and in desperation took to blogging for real with Apron Stringz. For a hot minute in 2020, I experimented with the commercial side of the internet, attempting to launch an online school for backyard homesteading, but this turned out to be bad for my writing and bad for my soul, and was thankfully short lived. These days I work 30 hours a week and scramble to keep up with my very ambitious garden. Time is precious and I write in occasional, unpredictable spurts about whatever happens to be on my mind in Homeplace.

Throughout all of these chapters, I have written under the pseudonym Calamity Jane. Calamity Jane is a legendary American character– cowgirl, rough rider, sharp shooter, rowdy maker and, possibly primarily, epic storyteller. It’s not known actually how much of her wild reputation was in fact pure bunk. Little of it was ever substantiated.

I myself was christened Calamity Jane by a co-worker way back in my budding years in Alaska when I bought my first very own rifle. The name stuck by pen only because in fact to know me is to know I am decidedly not a rough rider, sharp shooter or even rowdy maker. But I always wished I was those things, or at least contained the spirit of rambunctious adventure implicit in the name. What I have left of the Calamity character is the storyteller, because of which I can be whoever I say I am.

Calamity Jane. Cowgirl, renegade, cookie baker. Guess which one is actually true.