Colleen has years of experience writing blogs, news and magazine features, drama, and fiction. She has a journalism degree from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and a Masters in Counseling from the University of Cincinnati.
A resident of Cincinnati, Colleen performs in a theater company and loves to assist an interior designer with home and patio installations.
She also runs a tutoring program for underserved children in her neighborhood, driven by a passion for educational equity. She attends a diverse church working to serve an urban neighborhood.
Colleen has a passion to write for Christian causes, organizations, and churches. She wants to help individuals find their own connection to God. Other interests include biography, self-help, mental health, family life, gardening, landscaping, interior design, psychology, sociology, leadership, and community development.
Colleen has a Masters Degree in Counseling from the University of Cincinnati, a comprehensive program preparing students to be mental health providers in a variety of inpatient and outpatient settings. Colleen concentrated her studies on addictions and family dynamics.
Colleen has a BA in Journalism from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, a rigorous program preparing students for print, radio and TV reporting in conjunction with cadetships with news outlets.
She has seven years of experience coordinating programs and initiatives for mental health and drug abuse prevention, which include creative approaches involving storytelling, drama, roleplay. The population went from preschoolers to college students. She has an MA in Counseling from the University of Cincinnati, with internship experience in individual counseling, support groups, and alcohol addiction treatment. She has also been on her own journey battling depression, anxiety, and unhealthy relationships, a more powerful change process than any formal education. She loved conducting retreats to prevent burnout in student ministry interns and condensed the content into a blog series.
Colleen has been commissioned by churches, schools, agencies and event organizers to prepare presentations, curriculum and programs in the areas of mental health education, Christian eduation, spirituality, relationships, family life and literacy.
In addition to writing character-driven fiction, most of Colleen's blog posts have a relational component. How people relate to God, themselves, their families and their communities is a key focus for her. Graduate work in counseling has also equipped her to study and cite research in articles and posts.
How we relate to God individually, as families and as communities is her number one area of interest. She has a Christian worldview but can write for either Christian or general audiences. She has written material for individual and group retreats and conducted retreats and worship events with Friends of the Groom Theater Company for years. Creating experiences at the intersection of people's felt needs, and God's power and love is her sweet spot. Her vehicles have included articles, plays, novels, talks, and retreats.
Having studied family dynamics and raised one of my own, she can easily write about many aspects of family life, but what really interests her is getting to the underlying issues of why family life can be hard, what threatens the health of families in our culture, and how we can heal and grow to have healthier families. She has a series on what worked well for us as a family on my blog, and she wrote a ten-session high school health curriculum on the family dynamics related to addiction.
Raising three boys born within two years of one another has to count for something. Premature twin babies and a one-year-old made for a rough start, and her parenting has been challenged on many fronts in the 25 years since then. It was fun to write a blog series on ten of the things she thinks we did well. Her graduate degree in counseling and all those years in the trenches set her up well to write about parenting.
Her home living blog series has included, "10 Things I'm Glad We Did for Our Kids", a series on working from home, and tributes to family members in a series about inspiring people. Experience as an assistant to an interior designer and a love of gardening also make home living a strong interest for her; both in its physical and relational aspects.
Colleen has prepared and made countless presentations in educational and spiritual settings. These include:
Leading workshops on how to use drama for Christian education and worship at conventions, conferences and churches.
Leading retreats that alternate teaching with experiential activities, such as a women's retreat with talks each followed by time alone in nature with some focusing questions, time drawing and painting on prescribed themes, time journaling with prompts provided, etc.
Writing a comprehensive drug abuse prevention program for K-12, encorporating drama, storytelling, roleplay and other experiential lessons.
Coordinating a tutoring program with curriculum adapted to meet the needs of urban students living in poverty.
The presentation sample on this site is an example of how to do a Bible story drama with kids who can't act, in one rehearsal!
Colleen has 86 posts on her blog, a site where she promotes her writing and acting, as well as blogging on topics that help individuals, families, and churches draw closer to God. She has also written for Building Faith, an Episcopal Christian education website.
Colleen has written articles for community newspapers, Christian magazines, and her own book of personal stories, "When God Showed Up", published by College Hill Presbyterian Church. Her Master's Degree in Counseling has helped hone the soft skills of empathy, listening and acceptance that enable her to help people relax enough to talk about their interior lives.
Colleen has written items for newsletters for decades on everything from community theater to solar panels to church programs. Her journalism degree set her up for tight, accurate writing that makes its most important point in the first sentence.
Colleen has written seven books, two of them self-published.
Three were collections of drama for Christian worship and education, which sold of total of over 80,000 copies. The second and third books were commissioned by the publisher, Standard Publishing.
Another was a book of interviews written for a church, one was her first novel, "Drug Free Actors", available on Amazon, and one was a book of short stories, "Christmas on Pleasant Hill", also on Amazon. Her latest novel, "Someone They Can Trust" has not been published, yet.