Literary Lineage: A Family of Words
My great-great-aunt, Dorothy Burnham Eaton, was a published poet and the 1963 recipient of the New England Poetry Club's Golden Rose.
When I was around twelve or thirteen and beginning to write poetry myself, my grandmother gave me several of Dorothy's books. I remember holding the work of a poet who had come before me—a woman whose words had traveled through my own family and eventually landed in my hands. Those books became an early source of inspiration and, in some ways, a starting point for understanding myself as a writer.
They contain Dorothy's handwriting, inscriptions to my family, and letters she wrote to my great-grandmother. Decades later, I am writing my own books, and I sometimes think about the strange, beautiful possibility that something of her relationship with language made its way through our family to me.
Performance & Identity
Perhaps naturally, I followed the performative world that surrounded my childhood. From a young age, I found myself drawn to modeling, acting, and pageants, eventually becoming a Disney performer. I loved the creativity, discipline, transformation, and connection that came with stepping into different roles and being in front of an audience.
Those experiences taught me far more than how to perform. They taught me how to read a room, inhabit a character, communicate without words, and understand the complicated relationship between who we are privately and who we become in public.
Looking back, I can see how those early experiences became another thread in the person I would eventually become—a therapist, writer, and storyteller fascinated by identity, performance, and the stories we construct about ourselves.
The stage was one of my first classrooms. Long before I had the language for it, I was learning about the many versions of a person that can exist beneath the surface.
