Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
I opened this website in 2012 to introduce my Peace Corps memoir, At Home on the Kazakh Steppe, to readers. I saw it as a hub for discussion of the many ways culture impacts our lives. I hope you’ll explore the site.
You might start with my ABOUT page …
… which offers juicy tidbits of my life (or not) and pictures.
There you’ll read about me: my blogging mission and a summary of the many hats I’ve worn over the years.
The BOOKS page
Is split in two so I can include my husband’s five novels, written during the two years we lived in Kazakhstan.
Next, I suggest you dive into my LEARN MORE page …
… which includes “MORE” information (and LINKS) on the different themes from the memoir: friendship, Kazakhstan, the Peace Corps, and the importance of cross-cultural curiosity. I’ve also added links to the many resources listed in the eBook version of my latest book, LEAPFROG: How to hold a civil conversation in an uncivil era.
Interested in Gestalt Psychotherapy, Stuttering, or Travel for the over-50s? You’re in luck; I’ve included those topics too. I update it periodically, so do return.
Finally, let’s talk about my BLOG, And So It Goes.
I began this weekly blog in January 2013 while still learning what blogging was about. At first, I pulled often from my collection of “deleted scenes” from my memoir. You know, when you write a memoir, you only need so many stories to make a particular point, otherwise the overall story gets bogged down. As a result, some of my favorite stories ended up on the “cutting room” floor, so to speak. My blog was able to give them a new life and I hope you will check them out. “Deleted Scenes” is one of the categories you can search under.
Since those early years, And So It Goes has evolved to cover many topics — often whatever has captured my attention that week — with an angle toward the way culture impacts our lives, often without our awareness.
With each of those posts, I maintained my commitment to
curiosity, compassion, and courage.
The first few years, I focused on “Cultural Differences.”
From 2015: My Four Stages of Friendship
From 2016, A look at illegal clotheslines.
Then following the 2016 election, I became focused on Civil Discourse.
From 2017, a 10-part series on Civil Discourse. Here’s where the LEAPFROG book started. As of November, 2019 this ten-part blog series has been transformed into a small book, LEAPFROG: How to hold a civil conversation in an uncivil era. In April, 2022, the third edition came out. More details here. As of 2023, the book is in its fifth edition; I trust it’s the last.
From 2018, a three-part series on How Do We Talk About Race? (This link is the last in the series; it’ll take you to the earlier two).
By far the most read post was from February 2019, Meet Lindsay de Feliz, a guest post from a social media friend who compared not only the cultural differences she encountered upon moving to the Dominican Republic in 1991, but the ones she experienced when she returned to the UK to visit her family. Lindsay’s life was tragically cut short not long after that post when public.
In 2020, I had a string of posts on the pandemic sweeping the world. The one with the most traffic, however, was the one I did on wearing a face mask out in public for the first time. I hope you’ll take a look at Face Masks and the Power of Culture.
In 2021, I had only eleven blog posts, total. My life was changing.
As 2025 dawns, I returned briefly to share my “experience, strength, and hope” living with and loving a man with dementia. This was a new path for me, and one that had already taught me much. I wanted to share some of that with others.
And now, as June 2025 dawns, I am moving my blogging on this dementia journey to Substack. You can find me here
Perhaps it’s another CD: Cognitive Decline?