I grew up in the Midwest and spent some of my twenties in Denver, Colorado, working as a media buyer and copywriter in advertising, and in public relations for a cancer research and treatment hospital. I also did a stint as an “entrepreneur” seamstress, designing and selling clothes, before moving to the East Coast to live on a farm with my eventual husband, Peter Falk. (Not Columbo, Peter doesn’t even own a raincoat!)
Peter and I lived on a 15-acre homestead in central New Jersey, where we kept bees, grew organic vegetables and herbs, and had a menagerie of animals – chickens, sheep, goats. I wrote and published many articles, essays and poems about this period of my life. I also taught courses at Brookdale Community College in writing and media studies.
Enter the children. Our sons, Turner and Crosby, now in their 20’s, grew up on the farm, and are creative individualists with a love for nature. When all the farms surrounding the Newcomer-Falk household fell to developers like a house of cards, our family moved to a sweet little town, Interlaken, along the Jersey shore near Asbury Park.
Since Peter and I had spent 28 years on our farm, when I had to buy eggs at the supermarket after our move (no brown beauties from the henhouse), I literally cried!
I have continued to write articles, essays, poetry, children’s books, novels (marketing these!) and short stories. I teach journal writing workshops at Mary’s Place in Ocean Grove, a retreat for women battling cancer.
As I have noted in my essay about writing, “Magic Years” (see my portfolio page) writing is “as deeply ingrained, as much a part of who I am as the curve of my step or rhythm of my breath…I am a grown woman who will, given some free time and a bright day, gravitate towards the pen (or the garden) as inevitably as a moth to a flame.”