Recently I was thrilled to be asked to be the Keynote Speaker for the Brain Injury of Massachusetts’ 30th anniversary annual conference. I learned just days before the talk that it was a sold-out event. There would be more than 650 people in the audience. Writing the speech was challenging because the audience is so [...]

It may be horrifying for lay folks to learn this fact, but there is a mantra in residency called, “watch one, do one, teach one.” As an intern, I did not have the luxury of watching scores of intravenous insertions before I tackled my own. Lumbar punctures are done less frequently. If I had been [...]

I was honored to guest post on Sarah Pineo’s wonderful blog “Blurb is a Verb.” Memoirist Carolyn Roy-Bornstein asks: What Am I Doing? Carolyn Roy-Bornstein is a physician, a writer and a mom. Her dramatic memoir Crash comes out in a few short weeks. Reading her post, made me realize that as tricky as publicizing [...]

I recently had the honor of writing this guest post on Beyond the Margins: “Are you a writer?” These were the first words uttered by our Advanced Fiction-Writing instructor at the Harvard Extension School one autumn evening several years ago. We students looked around at each other sheepishly. Shyly, we sized each other up. This [...]

     I drove an hour and a half each way to give a pre-prom speech to the juniors and seniors at Coyle & Cassidy High School in Taunton, Massachusetts yesterday. The idea was that, as the mother of a boy, brain-injured by a drunk driver, I might be able to impart some wisdom to these [...]

     So I’m in this weird limbo-land: between finishing a book and the whatever-comes-next. That space between the exhale (Whew! That’s done) and the inhale (Eek!  What now?)      It’s not that I don’t have projects lined up. I do. The Writer magazine assigned me a book review.  I have edits to look over for [...]

     I’ve had a bottle of champagne in my refrigerator for quite some time now. It’s been chilling ever since my agent called me six months ago with the news that he’d sold my book.      But when do I pop the cork?      I got my agent before I had even finished writing my [...]

     I am a reserved person by nature. I am not given to raucous outbursts or loud displays of emotion.   I am my mother’s daughter. She was a demure southern belle, of the collected variety. I have inherited her quietude.      I was sitting with family on Scarborough Beach in Narragansett, Rhode Island this summer [...]

     This month I finished the revisions on my new memoir CRASH! The book now has a sub-title: A Mother, a Son, and the Journey from Grief to Gratitude. I like it. It captures that tricky-to-navigate space between gratitude that my boy is alive and grief for all he has lost.      In many ways [...]

     Earlier this month I spent a week at Disney World on a family vacation. It was a very special trip. My 5-year-old niece Emma, after a brutal year of chemotherapy and stem cell transplants for her neuroblastoma, was finally cancer-free. This was Emma’s big Make-a-Wish trip and since Auntie was there at her bedside [...]