About Me, Extended: Trivia for the Nosy

✯ I was a competitive swimmer for about 12 years, then a swim instructor, and now a swimmer again. My newfound love is open-water swimming in Lake Michigan, especially when the water is choppy. I think being an endurance freestyler all my life built the mental, physical, and emotional stamina necessary to be an audiobook narrator.

✯ I write sometimes. One of my audio samples is an original piece.

✯ I was homeschooled and raised in a high-demand religion, which I left as a teen after discovering feminist theory. I then won a scholarship to live in Germany for a year as an exchange student. I didn’t speak the language beforehand, nor had I set foot in a high school classroom. Our Language Camp, the first month of the program, took place in a castle in North-Rhine Westphalia.

✯ I grew up about an hour outside of Chicago with a forest preserve as my backyard. When I was a teenager, we left to road-trip around the United States for a year. We settled in Central Florida for a handful of years, and then I moved back to Chicago proper, where I’d always dreamed of living so that I could be a member of the Art Institute and swim in the lake. I love prepping my scripts in the Member Cafe, then biking home along the lakefront trail.

✯ My favorite movie is Love Lies Bleeding, and my favorite music genre is doom metal. My favorite book is always changing, but it probably has lesbians in it.

✯ I read more non-fiction than fiction in my leisure time.

✯ My first audiobook demo was recorded in a barn-turned-studio in Germany (as a gift from my lovely host parents). You can hear geese in the background.

✯ I’m an eldest daughter, an October Libra, and my favorite holiday is Halloween. While I have never seen a ghost (and consider myself a skeptic), one did briefly haunt my room – until it cut holes in a favorite pair of shorts and I made it leave.

✯ I was left-handed until 2025, when I got so frustrated with left-handed cursive that I made myself ambidextrous. Ink smudges begone!

✯ My passion for audiobook narration is nearly surpassed by my passion for digital organization strategies. I will start new projects just so I can create new databases for them in Notion. (Don’t ask me about my Notion databases unless you have snacks, water, and approximately two hours to spare. But please do ask me about them.)

✯ I used to run a small Etsy business where I sold hyper-realistic polymer clay miniatures. (Mostly pumpkins and apples.)

✯ I was supposed to spend 2020 backpacking in Europe, but when COVID hit, I used the money I’d set aside to launch my audiobook career instead. I’ve been an avid listener since the day I discovered Playaways at my local public library.

✯ If it wasn’t already obvious from all of the above, I am neurodivergent – ADHD in specific.