I grew up in Blue Bell, PA, attended St. Joseph’s Prep in Philadelphia for high school, and continued on to Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT to pursue my English Education degree.
In the spring of 2004, I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach English as a foreign language in Taiwan. During that year, I taught in a rural town on the east coast, about two and a half hours south of Taipei. After many months of attempting to acclimate to this place I’d known nothing about, I found that I had hundreds of pages of journals. With this base produced by conflicted alienation in the midst life-shaping adventure, I began writing my first book. Slowly, I outlined my story by selecting favorite and, even more so, least favorite experiences to extrapolate a cohesive memoir about my life’s transition; little did I know at the time that this was a project that would span many, many years.
In the fall of 2005, I moved to Taipei and continued teaching for another year before returning home in the summer of 2006. Moving from Philadelphia to East Hampton, NY to Fort Lauderdale, FL, and back again to Philadelphia, I continued work on this project. In 2009, I moved from Philadelphia to Boston, MA for a job as a cost of living surveyor, which afforded me global travel for five to six months of the year.
Using the inspiration that came from this new profession, I scrapped my first draft and began again. Three years later, I completed a second draft of my memoir. In December of 2012, I found myself unable to edit the work down any further and, with four hundred and fifty-three pages, I sought out help.
Through a friend of my sister, I found a structural editor who guided me as we fine-tuned my book into a tight and gripping story that filled one hundred and sixty-one MS Word pages – a far cry from the endless manuscript I had created. By the fall of 2013, I finally saw an end to this eight-year process as I hired a copy editor and a graphic designer to complete the last edits and to beautify my formatting and cover for publishing.
Now, at long, long last, I present to the world a book that I put every ounce of my heart into while learning the arduous craft of writing: CHEERS, BEERS, AND EASTERN PROMISE.
