Writing
Writing is how I remember, how I make sense of what’s here, and how I stay in relationship with a place and its people. Sometimes it takes the shape of long essays — weaving grief, memory, and local history into civic questions. Sometimes it’s an obituary written with a family, a reflection shared at a graveside, or a note in a newsletter. I’m also at work on a novel, carrying the same themes into fiction. Across all of it, my writing is rooted in Hudson and in the belief that stories — whether personal or collective — help us live more connected, more human lives.
My Substack
All My Dead & Living Things started out as the name for my Substack — a living archive of essays about Hudson, memory, grief, and community. I began it in February 2025 because I needed a place to bring together personal storytelling and civic life, to hold the past alongside the present. What started as reflections on gravestone tending and local history has grown into a practice of writing through belonging, displacemednt, parenting, and the ways small-city politics mirror larger struggles. Substack lets me share these pieces directly with readers’ inboxes, invite conversation, and sustain the work through free and paid subscriptions. It’s part memoir, part local journalism, part love letter to Hudson — borne from a desire to remember what matters and imagine what could come next.
Academic writing
I have a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and, before moving back to Hudson, spent three years as a researcher at Vanderbilt University. My work focused on how memory lives not just in the mind but in the body — especially in our hands. I studied how gestures help us remember, how they change depending on who we’re speaking to, and how even in the face of profound memory loss, the body still reaches for connection. These studies taught me that remembering is not only cognitive but also communal, relational, and physical — lessons that continue to shape my writing today.
Selected publications
Hippocampal declarative memory supports gesture production: Evidence from amnesia (2016): When people with hippocampal amnesia speak, their gestures are fewer and less vivid — especially when they try to recall episodes from their past. It’s not just that they can’t remember; it’s that their bodies move differently when memory is dim. This work links the strength of memory to the strength of gesture, in a way that says: to remember is to move.
Gesture height reflects common ground status even in patients with amnesia (2019) : Whether or not someone shares your knowledge changes how high you gesture. Even when memory is impaired, people adjust how they gesture depending on how much they think listeners understand. The hand lifts, subtly, into what’s known and what isn’t. Memory shapes those invisible judgments, too.
Mothers modulate their gesture independently of their speech (2015): Mothers change their gestures — size, timing, or how expressive — even when their words stay the same. That moment when you realize your hands are speaking something the voice can’t — this shows gesture doing more than “helping” words. Gesture reaches toward what words leave unsaid.
Hand Gestures and How They Help Children Learn (2018) — written for young readers: When we move our hands as we speak, we don’t just illustrate our words — we make it easier to learn and remember. In this piece for a young audience, I explained how different kinds of gestures (pointing, picturing, keeping time) can shape memory, mark when a child is ready to learn, and help lessons last. It’s science, but it’s also simple: sometimes the body knows something before we can put it into words.