About Lupa

Picture by Lawrence Brown, 2009

You know, even with all the bios I've written over the past few years, this is quite possibly one of the toughest. After all, in a way, this website is my bio. It's about me, or at least a significant portion of my creative life.

Anyway. I started out with a crappy little page hosted on Tripod back in 1998. I was making enough artwork to justify beginning to sell it, had learned some really rudimentary HTML skills through chat rooms, and had a friend with a digital camera. Over time I got better at the art and the web design (though I wouldn't call myself an expert in either), got my own URL, and otherwise rose out of those rather undignified roots. I kept on with the artwork and began to make a little bit of a name for myself.

And then....I became an author. And that changed everything. For a while, the artwork took a back seat to books. Writing books, editing books, publishing books! I got my first book published in 2006, and I got really involved with Immanion Press/Megalithica Books. One of the benefits of a small press is that there's always something to do. So I spent time as an editor, proofreader, layout tech and promo manager for the company, as well as an author.

And I learned a bit more about sharing in the process. You see, this page actually used to be about us for a time. My ex-husband (and best friend) Taylor Ellwood shared this site for a few years while we were married. Then the World's Friendliest Divorce happened, and he got his own site, which I highly recommend.

But now? I get to be all selfish and keep the site all to myself! Ha! (Okay, so I needn't be so smug. It was, after all, a very amicable divorce, and he is still my BFF, in case I didn't mention it enough.) But this newest iteration of my site is part of my moving into a new stage of my life, and I couldn't be happier or more excited for the future!

Wow. That's more about the website than it is about me. Hmmm. Would you like some bullet points? I'd like some bullet points. They'll make organizing this much easier:

  • I'm an artist who makes stuff out of dead stuff.
  • I'm an author who writes about paganism, shamanism, occultism, and related topics.
  • I'm a resident of Portland, Oregon. I love Voodoo Doughtnuts, hiking, and the plethora of book stores here.
  • I'm a graduate student working on a Master's in counseling psych. I'm especially fond of ecopsych, narrative therapy, art therapy, and other expressive therapies.
  • I can be bribed with good sushi, good quality chocolate, Bacon Salt, and the aforementioned doughnuts.
  • I am either a wannabe polymath or a dilettante, depending on how you look at it. My interests, hobbies and skill sets (beyond writing/editing, book layout, promotion and publishing, artwork and psychology) include but are not limited to sustainable gardening and food preservation, dancing to goth/industrial music, Western martial arts, reading voraciously, picking at fiction writing ideas that have yet to come to fruition, video games, suspension of disbelief through ritual drama, feeding stray cats, environmental activism, volunteering to benefit the homeless and formerly homeless populations, and a few other things not necessarily fit for discussing in polite company.
  • I'm generally approachable if you send me a polite email or happen to run into me at a pagan or other event. As long as you're civil the worst you have to fear is that I might try to sell you something. If you aren't civil--I mentioned the interest in martial arts, ne?

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