This is my favorite photo of myself. To my left is Blue, the horse who reawakened a sense of purpose in my life after the doors closed on my college teaching career. To my right is Ember, who has somehow inspired more of my discipline and devotion than thirty years of music performance. In this shot we are running together down the hallway of their barn, straight at the photographer, who is crouched on the floor just ahead of us and who has faith enough to believe that the horses will stop at my sides as soon as I halt, rather than running her over.

As you may have noticed, I am not holding their lead ropes.

When people ask what I “do,” it’s a hard question to answer. I might derive my steadiest income from playing and teaching the trumpet, but I’m also a writer of fiction with a growing reputation as a freelance copy editor. Before relocating to Alabama, I worked nearly full time in equine management, living on-site at a private dressage barn and taking care of several other animals at the barn where I boarded. I still have one or two horse clients now, though these days I’m usually called in to help with training rather than manure. With so many diverse identities under my belt, perhaps it’s fitting that I also operate as a giftedness consultant, helping people uncover their unique motivation and understand its implications for their lives.

As you might imagine, this collection of skills and experiences makes for fascinating living and a dreadful headache when it comes to online branding, but the common threads are a love of teaching, training, coaching, and refining and an absolute commitment to the students, clients, and horses who are counting on my expertise. Look around the site, check out the links for my affiliate sites (The Trumpet Pedagogy Project, my fiction homepage, and my horse-inspired Patreon), and keep an eye on the blog, which is where I’ll be trying my best to string this all together into a coherent platform. And, as always, let me know how I can be of help. :)

Thanks for visiting!

Photo credit Lori Copeland.