A few things about me: First, I have written two books on language, Sin and Syntax and Wired Style. The manual for Wired magazine came first, and got me dubbed “Marion the Librarian on a Harley, or E. B. White on acid.” That works.

I grew up in Hawaii, speaking grammatical English at home and Hawaiian creole (or “Pidgin”) with friends. This weird bilingualism has a lot to do with my fascination with language, but it didn’t stop there. I left the islands to get a bachelors degree in English Literature from Princeton (a conservative place, but I did learn a lot about the written word), after which I spent a few years writing fiction and drama, performing solo pieces in the San Francisco Bay Area. I can’t say I went straight after that, but I did earn a masters from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC-Berkeley, after which I worked as a reporter and editor at the Gilroy Dispatch, the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Examiner. I really started dabbling in the idiosyncracies of the mother tongue, though, while copy chief at Wired.

Freelance writing suits my personality, as I have eclectic interests. I’ve written about Latin plurals and Latino culture, Berkeley politics and Hawaiian sovereignty. My stories have  appeared in newspapers from the Los Angeles Times to the Miami Herald, as well as in magazines like The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Adventure, Smithsonian, Health, and Honolulu. I love the travel essay as a form, and have been published in many anthologies including France, A Love Story (Seal Press) and Best Travel Writing 2006 (Travelers’ Tales).

I am as passionate about editing and teaching as I am about writing. I worked as a developmental editor at Wired Books and today edit books for Harvard Business School Press. I have also directed many conferences for midcareer journalists, including the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism in 2008 and 2009. I coach fellows at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and I teach fundamentals of grammar to a dedicated group of word nerds at Harvard Extension.

I am a founder of The Prose Doctors, an editors collective, and a member of The Itinerants, a group of San Francisco-based writers.

Oh, and they say I dance a damned good hula.