Writing literary speculative fiction about water, defiance, and chosen family.
About me
I write about people who refuse to live in the world they’re given but choose instead to tend the seeds of a better one. When I’m not writing, I direct an environmental nonprofit protecting ecosystems and communities on an island in the Salish Sea.
About The Alis Switch
Complete at 108,000 words. A standalone with series potential, open for literary representation.
In the desertified ruins of the Salish Sea basin, Anda works as a midwife’s apprentice, chafing against the covenants that govern her world. She escapes to the rubble of old Tacom, where she tends the thing closest to her heart: a secret and forbidden bond with a herd of feral burros.
When prophesied twins lose their mother in childbirth, Anda does the unthinkable: she keeps them alive by milking Tam, a burro mother, in direct violation of community norms and strict covenants. The midwife Coashti, unable to reconcile the twins’ survival with scripture, will sacrifice almost anything—even the infants—to bring back the failing rains.
High above, a shrinking population dwells within Ark7—known below as the Collector. DSU-284, a cybernetically enhanced Service Unit, has begun to feel a dangerous longing. When the vessel suffers a critical failure and reboots with deadly frugality, 284 severs their uplink—sparing their charge Meroe, sacrificing their augmented capabilities, and stepping for the first time into a vivid, unfiltered world. They choose a path. They take a name. They meet Meroe anew, this time as a lover and a friend.
The legacy of Lujain Alis, Ark7 Lead Engineer, threads through both worlds. Generations before, when Alis chose her own daughters over the project, she hid a piece of code deep in the AI’s architecture. A switch, designed to activate in the Service Units showing the highest capacity for empathy. She left a map, pointing the way home, for anyone willing to look for it.
The Alis Switch is an examination of two societies navigating environmental collapse, meeting across a technological and cultural chasm, and finding a way forward. It can sit on the shelf next to Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, for its exploration of personhood across the boundaries of species and biology; Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations, for its tender and sometimes painful bond between a woman and the wild; and Scott Alexander Howard’s The Other Valley, for its portrait of a community bound by sacred rules and a daughter willing to break them.
For agents and editors—sample chapters or full manuscript available upon request.
Professional highlights
Novelist
The Alis Switch
My debut novel is a work of literary speculative fiction—complete at 108,000 words and open for representation. It’s a standalone with series potential.
Advocate
Executive Director, Whidbey Environmental Action Network (2023–present)
Leading a decades-old environmental nonprofit that protects ecosystems and communities through policy advocacy, civic education, and strategic litigation.
Senior Donor Organizer, Showing Up for Racial Justice (2022–2023)
Co-Executive Director (2020–2022) and Communications Manager & Fundraising Writer (2013–2022), Whidbey Institute
Organizer
Elected School Board Member, South Whidbey School District (2020–2026); WSSDA Board of Distinction: 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026.
Founding Steering Committee Member, Solidarity Over Supremacy (2020–present)
Appointee, Trust Lands Advisory Committee, Washington State School Directors’ Association (2025–2026)
State Advisory Appointee, Habitat Strategic Initiative Advisory Team, Wash. Depts. of Fish & Wildlife and Natural Resources (2025)
Founding Member, Affordable Housing Fund Advisory Committee, Whidbey Community Foundation (2024–2025)
Writer
Mule blog. In the 2010s, I wrote a daily blog about farm life, told with humor from a mule’s point of view. Though Brays of Our Lives is pretty quiet these days, a small but mighty fanbase still keeps an ear out for updates from Songbird the mule and Melvin the miniature burro.
Column. The Bold and the Brayful ran as a companion to my blog in the national magazine of the American Donkey and Mule Society.
Children’s book. In 2013, as Marnie Jones, I published In the Morning, a picture book illustrated by Welsh artist Allison Fennell.
Journalism. I wrote news, features, and poetry for regional newspapers and national magazines from 2007 to 2013.
Editing and design. I’ve spent nearly two decades editing and designing for trade and nonprofit publications, including seven years as assistant editor for the Timber Framers Guild (2007–2014) and five years as a prepress editor at Lithtex Northwest (2008–2013). I also edited Christiane Seuhs-Schoeller’s New Stories of Love, Power, and Purpose, a memoir and guide to meeting the unknown.
Teaching. From 2011 to 2013, I taught middle school language arts at Mt. Baker Academy, including literature, journalism, and story writing.
Learner
MSL in Environmental, Climate, and Energy Law, Lewis & Clark Law School, Portland, OR (expected graduation, May 2027)
BA in English, summa cum laude, Suffolk University, Boston, MA, 2003
In the Morning, a picture book
Occasional notes
on writing, publishing, and whatever else is on my mind
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