About Me

I was formed in chaos through grace.

If you follow..

the tickle belly hills far enough into rural Kansas you’ll find yourself off a two lane highway parallel to a set of train tracks. After you cross a bridge over a creek you’ll take a left hand turn down a gravel road next to a red barn, an alfalfa field, and a pig farm. Down that road you would find the patch of dirt where a house once stood. Once, you could hear the echoes of seven rowdy kids left to themselves. Abandoned by their father, surviving from their mother’s hard work, these kids spent some years being watched by their mother’s mother, who herself had borne thirteen children. Time stood still and rapidly approached the day that all of these kids and their mother moved to St. Louis where the wind, adolescence, and providence scattered them about. I am the fourth of these kids, the littlest big and the biggest little.

In fifth grade I stood five feet nine and three quarters of an inch tall, the exactness of this mattered then because I was racing one older brother against his height until finally, he won. I was always awkward and gangly and went about sharing my love of learning in fun facts and announcements filled with odd trivia. Never really fitting in, except with my siblings, I developed into a young women that raged and raged against herself and the whole wide world.

Then I met Hope.

After high school, I got an AA degree while most of my peers went on to four-year universities. Driving around in college, I picked up the usual players; other people that grew up in their own dysfunction, drugs, sex, and no boundaries. One day someone told me that God loved me. That he had a plan and a purpose for my Life. I believed them. Now I make different decisions. Not at first. It took me a few years to untangle myself from the people and places I had come to know. I spent my twenties learning new ways of living and functioning by going to therapy and addressing the ways in which I interact in the world, with others, and with myself, which has been the biggest battle that I have had to fight, even now.  

Now I want to share that hope.

After taking several writing classes at a community college for my AA degree and getting a short story published in their literary journal, I promptly got married and began working, not writing again for years, except in my journals. Writing became therapy for me, who for the first time in my life, saw a steadiness that had never been there. Through years of bareness, depression, health issues, healing and a strangely high number of personal losses I wrote a book.

I came to a place however, where I realized I didn’t know how to write with the literary devices that I wanted to, in order to finish the book in the way that I want to. I understood that I needed to learn from others the techniques that I wanted to write with. I applied in 2020 to finish my undergrad at MIZZOU and did so in 2022.

I want to write the kinds of books that make someone feel less alone. The book I’ve written is a field guide of sorts for the things I know:

• Poverty (In a Billy Mays infomercial voice: “Includes such things as a recipe for potato burritos, Ingredients include: a potato, tomato sauce, red pepper flakes and a burrito-the sole items in your pantry!”).
• Undiagnosed mental disorders in parental figures.
• Childhood sexual trauma.
• Unhealthy coping mechanisms (including but not limited to alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual addiction, projecting, avoidance, and others!).
• Wading through family dysfunction (with your own family and bonus edition: with your spouse’s family!).
• General chaos and havoc, and the flotsam and jetsam that surround it.
• Finding out the undiagnosed health conditions you have.
• Unexpected deaths in shocking quantities and ages.
• Healing.
• The identity you get to choose for yourself.
• That no matter where you find yourself you are not alone.
• The strength you have that you never knew.
• Hope in all the places you don’t expect, the kind that changes the trajectory of your life.

Welcome to the Battlegrounds,

I’ve been thinking about you, looking for you, praying for you.

All of this is for you.

So you know there is hope.

Take a look around, take what you need, leave the rest.

If I never meet you again, I love you and God loves you.

You matter. You are important.

This is why I battle.

Angela