A B O U T    U S

The owner of CRS began paid writing as a teenager, earning bylines in the Bangkok World and the Sacramento Bee before completing a degree in Journalism. Since that time she has published hundreds of essays, investigative pieces, short stories, business articles, poems, humor, snarky letters, jokes, reviews and features in periodicals including The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The Oregonian, Portland Tribune, New Woman, OMNI, California Today, Cosmopolitan, Portland magazine, USAir, Rain City Review, Reader's Digest, and Black Lamb. She edited a huge book about the history of Packard engines (yes, really) and several books about developmental disorders. She has worked as a reporter, sailing instructor, magazine editor, radio host assistant, and paralegal; she was lucky enough to see all 50 states by age 18. She taught ESL to Royal Thai Navy officers in Bangkok at 16; she fell into a puffin burrow in Iceland in 2005.

Her Willamette Week column "Whiplash" was the paper's most popular feature and syndicated nationally; she judged WW's fiction contest.  She taught fiction classes for Oregon Writers Workshop and the Mountain Writers Center in Portland and judged the Kay Snow Writing Competition for Willamette Writers. She has read her work for events at Barnes and Noble, Broadway Books, Powell's Books, Proper Eats, Bold Sky Cafe, The Rose Schnitzer Home, and smaller venues where the smell of coffee overpowers the scent of syllables. She has owned and operated three resume offices in California and two in Portland.

In 2006 she recorded the audiobook The Fabric of Autism, Weaving the Threads into a Cogent Theory. She presented 2008 career/resume workshops at New Seasons and for NELA (for college applicants). In 2009 and 2010 she delivered five writing workshops for Multnomah County.

In addition to writing instruction, she offers life coaching, advocacy and research for individuals in transition or undergoing trauma. She is a compulsive resource and catalyst. She sings on key. 

But don't ask her to explain Fermat's last theorem, monoclonal antibodies, or the befuddling popularity of "Dancing with the Stars."