Stories have always been how people carry the truth across generations. I came to screenwriting the same way I came to everything else—through the conviction that the stories we're not telling are the ones most worth telling. My scripts don't start from Hollywood formulas. They start from people: a fifteen-year-old Native girl who decides to fight a racist school board, a dying cowboy who has to reckon with a life of hard edges and harder choices, a Native man in recovery who stumbles onto something hidden beneath Portland's streets. Each story is rooted in specific place, specific culture, specific consequence. That's what makes them universal.

My writing pushes against the grain of easy answers. Whether it's a family drama set between Michigan and Hawaii or a limited series weaving together historical atrocities and present-day corruption, I write toward the complicated truth—the moment when a character can no longer pretend, when the cover story runs out. I've spent over thirty years doing cross-cultural work in some of the most contested spaces in North America, and that's the material I bring to the page. There's always a plenty of wry humor in there too, because if you can't laugh at the absurdity of what human beings do to each other, you'll never survive writing about it.

I don't work in a vacuum. My craft has been shaped by some of the most experienced people in the industry. My primary script consultant and mentor is Sabrina Parra, former Vice President at Di Novi Pictures and founder of The Scriptster—she has pushed my work toward professional industry standards without letting me flatten the Indigenous perspective that makes it distinctive. I've also worked with Rex McGee, a Hollywood story analyst whose credits span United Artists, Warner Bros., and The Ladd Company; Jeff Arch, Humanitas Prize winner and Academy Award, Golden Globe, Writers Guild, and BAFTA nominee; and David Paul Kirkpatrick, former production chief of Walt Disney Studios and former president of Paramount Pictures. These aren't names I drop lightly. Their investment in my work tells you something about what they see in it.

If you're new to the film industry, you may see references below to pitch decks and sizzle reels and wonder what those are. A pitch deck is a visual document—think of it as a short book of images, story description, character sketches, tone references, and market context—that gives producers and executives a feel for what a project is before they read the full script. A sizzle reel is a short video, usually two to four minutes, that captures the mood, stakes, and world of a project through music, imagery, and voice. Together they're a project's calling card. For many of my current projects, both are available upon request.