Nicole Emmi

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
William Wordsworth

Though my twenty-year-old self would never have believed it, these days I am (at least in part) a sentimental, suburbanite, soccer mom. That means I’m awash in the wonder, challenge and hilarity involved in raising three boys and preparing to launch them out into the world. I’m also the lucky wife of the best man I’ve ever known, Dennis, and step-mother to his three teenaged daughters. So while I’ve always been passionate about writing and have done so in various forms and outlets throughout my life, the current ‘breathings of my heart’ center around my role as Carol Brady to our blended family. (No, we don’t have an Alice. Yes, I wish we did - mostly for laundry, and perhaps the occasional pot roast served with a side of simple, sage advice.)

Simultaneously, ‘Mr. Brady’ and I are both working full time (he in law enforcement, I in the dental field) and also focusing on what we’d like to be busy with once our brood has flown the nest. For me, the answer unquestionably involves writing. I am currently chipping away at my first novel and have already made copious notes on it’s sequel. I look forward to someday having the time to flesh out all of my ideas! I’d also like to return to travel writing at some point. In the meantime, I’m content to just enjoy the journey. Busy family life provides me lots of food for thought and writing inspiration. Sometimes it’s comical, sometimes (way) less so, but it is always a new adventure. And as it turns out, the passion, conviction and sentiment involved in being a parent is terrific fuel for the creative process.

When I’m not playing chauffeur, chef, maid and child psychologist to our “six-pack,” I try to take the advice of author Joseph Campbell to ‘follow your bliss’ - those things that make you, as he puts it, “feel the rapture of being alive.” Besides writing, I tend to find my bliss in things like meditation, macro photography, hiking and backpacking, volunteerism, and traveling with my husband - preferably somewhere I can bury my feet in warm sand and sit by the ocean.