I was born on the East Coast, but only lived there for about six months. My dad had a construction job in Massachusetts, so I was born in Boston. We moved to southern Washington and then to Willow Creek, California, where I grew up. I was about three when we moved there. It's a very rural place; pretty awesome to grow up in, also very weird and isolated.

My dad owned and still owns a swimming pool maintenance and construction business. My mom had a lot of random jobs. She passed in 2020 when I was 27. My parents split when I was young, so I lived between their homes most of my life until my mom left when I was 12 and moved to Indiana, where her mom and all her side of the family lived. I have a younger brother who still lives in Willow Creek and is taking over the family business. He's happily married. He's younger than me, but he's a dad, which is funny because I still think of him as a baby.

I moved to Portland in 2013 to study English and creative writing. I'd always wanted to be a writer from a young age, and I just needed to leave Humboldt. I needed creative community. A couple of friends had already moved up to Portland. I'd been a barista for a few years, so I got a barista job pretty quickly and went to Portland State. I loved school.

I'm really glad I went to college. After a sheltered upbringing in Humboldt, I felt very inspired and very empowered going. That's when I started taking writing more seriously. I minored in creative writing and had professors who were really encouraging. I started learning how people publish things, how you can get better, how you can join writing groups. I joined some, started editing for a magazine, and got as involved in the Portland writing scene as I could.

I kept doing the barista thing and made a lot of friends that way. I published my first piece of writing in 2019. My whole life is writing, for better or worse. I don't know what I'd do otherwise.

I was a barista for 16 years; I started when I was 15. I quit a year and a half ago and got my first office job. I feel like I'm still processing how that whole thing really defined me, but what I definitely learned is that I'm not okay working in customer service. I was really burnt out by the end. I also made a lot of close friends over the years, was able to travel, made time for writing, learned how to be independent. I miss it sometimes.

My current job is a 9-5 in the marketing department at a structural engineering firm. Weird job, but stable. Pays the bills. I live in Portland still, with my cat and my boyfriend. We were friends for two years before we finally admitted we wanted to date. I love our life.

The best advice I ever got was from a woman who worked in the office at my high school. She was really sweet, kind of a mentor for me junior and senior year. She told me: "Do not settle." I think about that a lot. It's really pushed me to not stay stuck in things like jobs and relationships. Now that I'm 32 and not 16, I also think there's something to settling that's actually good. It's easy for me to always be chasing the next best thing, getting to a different stage of life and asking, "okay, how do I make this better?" Settling into something and mining it for depth and being more present… that kind of feels like the opposite of that advice, and it's been really important to me the last few years.

My happiest memory is fishing with my parents on a lake in Northern California. My brother and I were in the canoe, trout fishing, and I caught a sunfish. I remember it really well even though I was pretty young. I was just totally in awe of the experience of catching a fish, even though it was a little fish. It was a beautiful day.