A native of the small town of Towanda, Pennsylvania, I  spent some of the early years of my married life with our family as a missionary to Chad, Africa. There while I taught primarily in the area of women’s ministries, I also taught English as a Second Language in the Ecole Secondaire Biblique in Chad.  It is important to note that in those years  in Chad, I also learned the importance of being flexible and creative as a wife, mother and teacher. After all, we did live without electricity, a telephone and note this, all before the era of technology…the internet and Facebook.

Since those years in Chad, I have also been blessed to travel and to teach or speak in Togo, West Africa, South Africa, Ecuador and Canada.

Civil war in Chad brought us back to the States and I returned to school, finally earning a Masters Degree in English/Creative Writing from Binghamton University.

I spent twenty-five years in Student Development as a Dean, taught writing and women’s ministry courses at Davis College and Clarks Summit University.  I also worked with the learning or physically disabled students helping them find and use the accommodations that would enable them to have academic  success.

After retirement in 2013, I was a bit lost until I began teaching adult creative writing courses in the fall of 2013 at Abington Community Library where I continue to teach both creative fiction and nonfiction writing classes. You can find some of my teaching notes from those classes going back several years under the Writing Resources section.

It is probably most important to introduce myself as well as a wife since 1965, then a mother of three and grandma of nine with three spouses added to the family, and our first great-grandchild born in 2016.

In my spare time, I love to cook, bake, read, and of course write about most anything that comes to mind, including our adventure of living in a tiny house.

So browse around. You will see that I am interested in most things Irish, especially since I am writing the story of how my great-great-grandparents, the Brennan family came to this country from Ireland in 1848. In this book, I am taking everything factual that I could find out about my family and the history of the time and blend these facts with some creative story-telling to share a story common to many immigrant families of the 1800’s. And you get to look over my shoulder and read early drafts of the story.

My Blog is the repository for things I held in my head just long enough to want to write them down to share with you. Think old-fashioned diary or journal, where you write about things that matter to you.