Writing & Literary Practice
Poetry · Essays · Creative Nonfiction · Journalism · Editorial Leadership · Professional Writing
Writing is an evolving practice of attention, inquiry, and deep listening.
My literary work moves across poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and reflective narrative. Across these forms, I explore memory, place, identity, ecology, spirit, lived experience, and the interconnected relationships that shape how meaning is made.
I draw from the natural world, ancestral memory, interior and exterior landscapes, travel, personal history, and connections to place and community. Through poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction, I trace the threshold between inner experience and the outer world — where landscape, memory, body, and spirit shape one another.
My process is attentive, layered, and often interdisciplinary. I work through fragments, images, field notes, visual materials, research, memory, and reflection. In this way, writing becomes a form of space-building: a place where experience can be held, questioned, transformed, and given shape.
Alongside this literary practice, my journalism, editorial leadership, and professional writing extend my commitment to language as a tool for clarity, connection, public understanding, and meaningful communication.
Selected Publications & Writing
My poetry has appeared in Illya’s Honey, Emerge Literary Journal, The Rusty Nail, and other publications.
My journalism and feature writing has appeared in regional publications including the Pueblo Star Journal and World Journal, where I have written about community life, arts and culture, environmental stewardship, education, innovation, and public life.
My essays and reflective writing appear through Soulful Living with Heather, where I write about creativity, meaning-making, creative practice, leadership, well-being, place, and the ongoing work of becoming
Poetry
My poetry explores environmental memory, embodied experience, ecological attention, ancestry, identity, and the spiritual dimensions of lived experience. Rooted in place, it often moves through image, scene, sensory detail, and lyric reflection.
I am drawn to poems that hold tension: between wilderness and domesticity, inheritance and self-making, grief and renewal, solitude and relation, the visible world and the unseen.
This work is part of an emerging manuscript and broader literary practice shaped by ecopoetics, ancestral inquiry, environmental memory, and the spiritual dimensions of place.
Essays & Creative Nonfiction
My essays and creative nonfiction explore creativity, meaning-making, personal transition, place, leadership, well-being, and intentional living.
Through reflective and place-based inquiry, I write about the ongoing work of becoming: how we adapt to change, cultivate attention, creativity, meaning-making, personal transition, place, leadership, well-being, and the ongoing work of becoming
This work appears through Soulful Living with Heather and continues to develop alongside my broader creative practice in poetry, visual art, healing arts, and land-based reflection.
Journalism, Features & Public Writing
My journalism and feature writing focuses on community-driven initiatives, rural life, environmental stewardship, arts and culture, education, innovation, and public life.
Through work for publications such as the Pueblo Star Journal and World Journal, I have written about the people, places, projects, and ideas shaping Southern Colorado and beyond.
This writing reflects my interest in how narrative strengthens civic imagination, cultural connection, and community understanding. Public writing, for me, is a way of documenting lived places, honoring local knowledge, and helping communities see their own stories with greater depth and complexity.
Editorial Leadership
I serve as Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Red River Review, one of the early online literary journals, originally founded in 1999.
Under my leadership, Red River Review is being relaunched and expanded as a literary arts journal publishing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, hybrid work, visual art, and writing on creative practice. The journal’s renewed vision includes publication, archival preservation, contributor development, craft conversation, workshops, and community-building for writers and artists.
My editorial work includes shaping the journal’s vision, curating literary and visual work, developing calls for submissions, supporting contributors, leading publication strategy, stewarding the archive, and building a thoughtful creative ecosystem around the journal.
This work reflects my commitment to literary culture, creative exchange, and the role of publishing as a space for reflection, connection, and artistic development.
Professional Writing & Editing
Alongside my literary and editorial practice, I support organizations, businesses, creative entrepreneurs, and mission-driven leaders through writing and editing that emphasizes clarity, structure, strategy, and meaningful communication.
My professional writing and editing work includes:
- Strategic plans and organizational and operational documents
- Grant proposals and funding narratives
- Reports, articles, and public-facing communications
- Website copy, digital archiving, and organizational messaging
- Curriculum, instructional materials, and program content
- Impact storytelling and stakeholder communications
- Developmental editing, structural editing, and line editing for essays, articles, and longer-form projects
This work draws on my experience in education, program design, organizational development, literary editing, journalism, and creative practice.
Current Literary Direction
I am currently developing a body of literary and interdisciplinary work rooted in ecopoetics, creative nonfiction, ancestral inquiry, environmental memory, visual assemblage, and the spiritual dimensions of place.
This work is part of a larger creative practice that includes poetry, essays, collage, mixed media, book arts, handmade journals, and reflective inquiry. Across forms, I am interested in how language and image help us attend more deeply to what has been carried, altered, lost, remembered, and renewed.