About Space Coast Stories

I’ve spent most of my life telling stories. More novels than I can keep track of, under more names than I’ll admit to. Making things up has never been the hard part.

I didn’t grow up here. I landed on the Space Coast about five years ago, been in Florida the better part of a decade, and somewhere in there it became home. Which is a funny thing for someone whose whole job is other people’s roots, being a person who had to grow her own.

Space Coast Stories started with an uncomfortable thought. The people I love most are the ones whose stories I know the least. I can recite the plot of a hundred books. I couldn’t tell you what my own grandparents’ childhoods actually felt like from the inside. And once someone’s gone, that’s it. There’s no getting it back.

So I started asking. What surprised me was who had the good stuff. The relatives who “didn’t have any stories,” the quiet ones, the ones who wave you off at the dinner table, turned out to have the best ones of all. They just needed someone to ask the right question and then get out of the way.

That’s the job. I ask what people don’t think to ask, I listen close, and I turn what comes out into something a family can keep. Sometimes that’s a deck of cards that cracks a Sunday dinner wide open. Sometimes it’s a workshop where a room full of people who “never talk about the past” suddenly won’t stop. And sometimes it’s a real book with a real life inside it.

What I believe

A person is a library. Everything they learned and loved and survived and quietly figured out is shelved somewhere in there. Lose the person and you lose the library too. Most of it was never written down. Almost none of it had to disappear.

I can’t stop people from going. But I can make sure that for the families I work with, the important parts get kept. In their own words. While there’s still time to ask.

The particulars

I’m based in Brevard County and I work all over the Space Coast, from Melbourne up through Viera, Rockledge, and Merritt Island, and by phone or video for families who’ve spread out. I have a background in writing and communication, a good ear, and a real soft spot for the quiet ones at the end of the table.

If any of this is ringing a bell for someone in your family, let’s talk. Starting is the hard part, and I make that part easy.