Dia daoibh, a chairde! (Hello, my friends!) Thank you for visiting my online writing portfolio. I am a professional singer, actress, and writer. I am also an Irish traditional singer, a teacher of that ancient style (Sean-nós), and an Irish speaker, hence the ~trés Ünīqû3~ attempt at a hook for this bio. My Irish-American identity not only plays a huge role in my career as an artist but informs my worldview and therefore my work as a writer. For some reason be it a past life, a collective consciousness, or things I heard around the house growing up, as a young child, I wrote stories about English landlords and Irish peasants during The Great Hunger, transatlantic emi/immigration, and Depression-era period pieces. Who can say why my young brain chose to obsess over such bleak and distant historical themes, but as a young adult, it still does!

Despite some raw talent or precociousness, I *desperately* needed to learn technique. So after completing a theatrical conservatory certificate at the American Musical & Dramatic Academy in New York City, I finished my BFA degree in the Riggio Writing & Democracy Honors program at The New School. With a concentration in fiction, I also studied poetry and screenwriting under amazing mentors and literary heroes of mine. I’m so grateful to them for teaching this obsessive documenter how to structure and edit my observations, how to bring craft and a social conscience to my stories.

Some of my short fiction and poetry is published, which you’ll find on the Published Works page. My novel is 5 years in the making, and we’ve been to several great workshops and on research trips together, but I’m waiting for a little more age and a little more talent to start querying. At least age is something I can count on progressing! The home page of this site is for pieces I don’t think would suit traditional publication but which I feel compelled to share anyway: some odes, op. eds, and acrostic poems of all things! I like taking that form we may associate with elementary school days and using it to explore more adult themes. I find it’s a lovely way to unpack a word, like if a word were a fan with a beautiful painting inside when opened.

In all of my work, no matter what genre I’m writing or what artistic discipline I’m focusing on, I’m interested in asking questions to arrive at more questions (are there ever really answers?), exploring things like family relationships, how history informs the present, the human condition and what makes people tick…as well as bringing a magnifying glass to those ironies, juxtapositions, complexities, the small moments of ordinary life that glimmer for some reason. I think my quest–too grand a word, Maddie–is to find out why they glimmer, and to try to capture it.