About Sharon

At the ambitious age of 10, my first job was delivering weekly newspapers in a small winter resort town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I worked until the blue racing bike on layaway at the local hardware store was fully paid. Daunted by the snow trek to deliver the papers and ask for payment, I realized my innate talent as a babysitter. Circumstances forced me to take an early retirement package in high school when my social life interfered with my 35 to 50-cents per hour earning capacity. I remained in retirement until I was chosen to represent my high school on a local department store Teen Board. On Saturdays, I sold clothes to my friends.modeled in the tea room, and wrote copy for a monthly column in Seventeen Magazine called Fashion Flash! Occasionally, my newsy fashion report from our local Teen Board would actually appear in the magazine. Later, I used this experience as a legal secretary. What I lacked in legal skills I compensated for in buying office supplies and ordering lunch for the lawyers.

Eventually, I found my way into the airline and travel industry and, with two partners, opened a retail travel agency. With that collective experience, which I now consider good preparation for social work, I became a corporate consultant, setting up in-house travel departments, and negotiating airline contracts and perks for the CEO. As the travel industry became more automated and less fun, I made the decision to seek meaning in my work and, on a dare, applied to and was accepted into the School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the University of Kansas. After two years of hospital internships and part-time work for my research professor in his private practice, all while earning my masters degree in social work, I became the Clinical Coordinator of an adolescent addiction recovery program. In my spare time, I worked with court mandated sex offenders and did contract Family Preservation Social Work for the State of Kansas while guiding a teenage son through high school.

After moving to Arizona in the mid-1990s I was offered a teaching job at Arizona State University in the School of Social Work. Meanwhile, I earned a PhD in Relational Psychology, based on the work of Jeanne Baker Miller at The Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies at the Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College. My doctorate was granted by the innovative Union Institute and my doctoral research explored the effect of father-loss on women whose fathers were killed in World War II. My dissertation formed the basis for articles, essays, speaking gigs, and my second book, Phantom Father: A Daughter’s Quest for Elegy (1st and 2nd editions).

When invited, I speak at national and international professional conferences about ethics, grief and loss, and other social issues. I conduct ethics training for social workers who need to maintain their credentials and, I conduct and facilitate grief and loss seminars. Keynote presentations about the search for and recovery of my father’s WWII lost crash site have allowed me to travel around this country and several others. I am a member of the Board of Trustees for the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.

In 2005, a series of curious and fortuitous events took me from teaching at Arizona State University to Saint Martin’s University in Olympia, Washington, just outside Seattle to live on a little blue houseboat. I loved my job as a tenured professor of Psychology and Community Services until my husband of four-decades became terminally ill. I returned home to manage his care and to make the most of the time we had remaining. In that process I wrote and published two books and he was my best reader. Now,four children and ten grandchildren occupy special places in my heart. Each brings me joie de vivre and the inspiration that informs my life.

Papergirl to Author in 70 short years!!