I was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, raised in Galloway Township, graduated from Oakcrest High School in southern New Jersey. I attended Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, and graduated from Stockton University in Galloway, NJ in 1974 with degrees in Philosophy, English Literature, and (almost) music. After that, I taught piano to local children and adults in the 70s and 80s, had a catering business “Jean’s in the Kitchen” from 1980-1992, then went to graduate school at Rutgers Camden to obtain my Masters’s Degree in Social Work. Since 1996 I have worked as a therapist and counselor first in New Jersey for five years and then, when our family moved to Maine, in Augusta, Maine for five years. For the past 17 years, I have had a private psychotherapy practice in Gardiner, Maine, During the pandemic, I packed up and moved my office home to Washington, Maine.

In the year of my seventieth birthday, I decided to write and self-publish a memoir about our parents’ World War II romance, Dear Milly. I began blogging on Medium in earnest in 2020 and have posted more than 190 stories including a block of stories about my catering career which I hope to turn into a book in the next year.

I have been writing and collecting poetry since childhood but never showed it to anyone. Recently, I learned how valuable it could be to join a group for feedback and support for my writing. I have taken several courses and written many more poems and recently had my first poem accepted for publication. Off in a new direction, again…