I'm Trick Dog Trainer, a Stunt Dog Judge, and the author two books, the memoir, FOR THE LOVE OF A DOG, (Harmony Books), and the novel, BODY SHARERS (Rutgers University Press). BODY SHARERS placed among the finalists for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for Best First Novel. Recent honors include finalist for the 2017 Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, winner of the 2016 Briar Cliff Review Nonfiction Award, winner of the 2013 Florida Review Editor’s Award, and a Best American Essays 2015 Notable Essay. I teach creative writing and dog training in Tampa Bay.
“Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.” -Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.” — Zora Neale Hurston
Cut the ending. Revise the script. The man of her dreams is a girl.- Julie Anne Peters
You are never stronger . . . than when you land on the other side of despair.- Zadie Smith
Keeping busy is the remedy for all the ills in America. It’s also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.- Joyce Carol Oates
Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously . . . no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.
– Edwidge Danticat
How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than create it herself.
– Anais Nin
Our private and beautiful body parts/ should be renamed. There should be as many/ ways to describe them as there are seashells.
– Katherine Riegel
Bring forth the furious goddess with no fucks to give. We are waiting. In the meantime, we’ll do the job ourselves.
~ Susan Lilley
I’m proud and happy to announce my flash nonfiction essay, “His Apple Pie,” about a border collie and a bad guy, appeared today in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. For […]
