About Paula

When I was seven, I wrote my first book, Fat Man, Thin Man, on folded and stapled typing paper. In junior high, as an assignment in English class, I wrote my first mystery on lined tablet paper about a female teen character eerily similar to Nancy Drew. Throughout my school years, when my class was given a writing assignment of any kind, I dove into it with a smile while my classmates groaned.

No surprise, then, that I majored in Creative Writing at Pennsylvania State University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree. Between pregnancies, births, and diapers, I learned to weave. A couple of years later, I received a Master’s of Fine Arts in Fantasy in fiction and weaving. For my MFA, I wrote a young adult fantasy manuscript that involved the secret to achieving the royal blue color in dyeing cloth for king’s robes, and hung an exhibit of my framed pictorial weavings.

In the early 90s, I created my weaving business, Nettles and Green Threads (the name taken from a fairy tale), and sold my luxurious rayon chenille wearables and throws at craft shows across the country. Individual customers, boutique shops, and galleries from the US, Europe, South America, and Japan purchased my work. It appeared at resorts like the Greenbrier Hotel (WV) and the Broadmoor (CO), and in museum shops like the Smithsonian’s Renwick.

Even as I spent hours at the loom to fill orders, I wrote. In 2006, I completed and self-published Weaving a Woman’s Life: Spiritual Lessons from the Loom. The book won several awards, including a Bronze in the self-help category in Foreword Magazine’s 2006 Book of the Year Awards.

Several years later I left the weaving business to coach other writers, to edit, and to write and publish my weekly newsletter, Divine Muse-ings.

I’ve written two novels, In the Land of the Vultures (Wild Rose Press, 2018) and The Tempting Voice (Rowan Prose Publishing, 2026), as well as two nonfiction books published by Red Feather/Schiffer Publishing: Tarot for the Fiction Writer: How 78 Cards Can Take You from Idea to Publication (2019) and Enchanting Creativity: How Fairy Tales, Dreams, Rituals, and Journaling Can Awaken the Creative Self (2022).