Thanks for stopping by!
I’m Jessi: raised in Idaho, in love with Hawaii, attached to Arizona and currently living in San Antonio, Texas with my husband and our five amazing children.
I’m a writer, veteran, mother, and military spouse, and I’m bringing stories back to the fun, heartfelt, traditional goodness they once were.
I believe creativity is a gift from God that must be nurtured within ourselves and our children.
Stories and art, created by real humans, are what connect us.
Writer, Veteran, Mama, Mil Spouse and NSA Intelligence Analyst
About Jessi
Beginnings
I’ve been sure of three things in my life.
One, that I hate onions. I had a biting problem as a child, and my mom’s punishment was to have me bite into a raw onion. It worked. I still don’t eat onions. Two, I knew I had to marry my husband before he was my husband. Five kids and almost twenty years of marriage later, I can say I was right. And three is that I am a writer. I grew up reading Shel Silverstein, Roald Dahl, JK Rowling, and lots of poetry from Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and my favorite, Edgar Allen Poe. Avid readers often turn into Avid writers, and I began crafting stories and poetry of my own before I graduated elementary school.
I grew up in what was the very small, but now-growing town of Horseshoe Bend, Idaho before moving to Meridian, Idaho my freshman year. I finished highschool early and spent the rest of my senior year in Mexico with my family on a 54ft D’war Ketch Sailboat sailing the baja. It was in Mexico that I decide I wanted to join the United States Air Force and see the world before attending college.
Air Force and Military Career
Spoiler alert. I didn’t see the world. My first duty station was at Fort Meade, Maryland where I was assigned to the National Security Agency Headquarters and spent almost 15 years as an Intelligence Analyst. Thus far, my husband and I had welcomed two children into the world and were concerned about the possibility of both being deployed at the same time, so when NSA offered me a job as a government civilian, I decided to leave the Air Force and support my husband as he continued to serve.
Working at NSA was amazing and challenging. I was honored to be selected as the first Intelligence Analyst assigned to their newly formed Hostage Event Management Team and the first operator assigned to the newly created NSA situation room: The Battlebridge.
And yes, I had to get NSA’s permission to write that…
And no, I can’t elaborate.
Writer and Creator
Fast forward to 2020. We were stationed in Hawai’i when the pandemic hit the world and I was six months pregnant with our fifth child. One week after I was sent home from work as being “high risk” because of the pregnancy, I went into pre-term labor, and our son was born 11 weeks early. He was the size of my husband’s hand, and we were terrified of the circumstances he had just been born into. I held him for the first time one week after he was born, and on that same day, we were informed we could no longer see him: one of his doctors had tested positive for COVID, and the entire NICU was being quarantined.
I spent the next several weeks driving breast milk to the door of the hospital twice a day, homeschooling my other four children, and crying in the shower where they couldn’t see me. It was then that I remembered I was a writer. In the past, when someone I loved had died or when I fell in love— really, any time I had more emotion than I could contain, I would write. So I started writing a poem to thank the nurses who went against hospital policy to video chat me from their personal cell phones so I could see my son.
When the dust settled and quarantines and masks became the new way of life, an acquaintance of mine posted on Facebook announcing he had self-published a book. I stared at his post forever thinking “he published a book? Just like that, wrote a book and now people can buy it?” It was the biggest lightbulb moment for me and overnight I decided I was going to focus on my writing and become a full-time writer like childhood-me always wanted.
One thing led to another, and I discovered Screenwriting. I was selected into the Writers Guild Foundation Veterans’ Writing Project Screenwriting Fellowship and later got an agent for my children’s books which are currently “on sub”, with the hopes a publishing house will want to publish them.
I believe with all my heart I was meant to put books in people’s hands and movies on the screen. I believe artists can change the world. I can’t wait to share my stories with you. I believe everyone has a purpose in life. Everyone has a path given to them by God and it's up to us to find and follow it. It can be challenging to keep faith through the trials and tribulations of life, but I believe if we listen and reflect we can find it.