"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."
~William Wordsworth
I grew up playing in the fields and streams of Pennsylvania. In my twenties, I moved to southern Vermont where I taught school, kept chickens, and stayed put to raise two spirited daughters on a dirt road in a forested town. Now I live among oak and spruce on the rocky coast of Maine.
Natural places are home to me–––backroads and ponds, salt rivers and harbors, the woods, and the sea. As a writer, I'm curious about how the interior lives of people play out against the backdrop of a moody landscape in rural communities like the one where I live.
My debut story story collection, They Could Live With Themselves (Press 53) is set in the fictional town of Stark Run. Like most of what I write, these stories are about farmers and creatives, loss and desire, aging and death. They're about murky boundaries and unexpected alliances.
I'm a freelance editor and writing coach, and founder of Maine Coast Writers Workshops and Retreats. For the time being, all of our offerings are online.
They Could Live With Themselves, published by Press 53, was runner-up in the 2015 Press 53 Prize for Short Fiction, a Silver Medalist for the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and a finalist for the Maine Book Award.
"Jodi has a natural ease in her storytelling and an unsentimental yet compassionate depth of understanding of human foibles and desires.”
~Frank Smith, Portland Herald Press
