About Me

With my son Peter at Westport graduation, 2015.

My late husband, David Hartwell, and I first bought property in Westport in 2007 as a second home. My children and I relocated to Westport in 2009 for the schools. David worked for Tor Books in that Flatiron Building in Manhattan and came up a lot, mostly on weekends. Our house in Pleasantville, New York, in Westchester County had a school district line running through it which had arrived via a lawsuit up the hill. So we had a choice between two top-flight New York State school districts. David's children by a previous marriage had gone to the Byram Hills school district while living in that house. We opted for the other one, the Chappaqua district. When the kids and I relocated it Westport for the schools, we chose the Westport district over those two because in our opinion as parents, Westport Central School District was better for our kids.

Shortly after we settled in, I received a "Dear Taxpayer" letter from a candidate for the Westport Board of Education, and so I responded and took him on. Thus began my advocacy for Westport Central School and its budget. I ran a website WestportEducation.com advocating for educational spending. (I also ran the blog WestportonLakeChamplain.com promoting the town.) And I was part of a group of parents who knew our voters and where most people stood on supporting education, and we turned out the vote and passed budgets.

A Board of Education member whose term was expiring recruited me to run for his seat, and I had paperwork all filled out and was ready to start collecting signatures. But Ted Cornell sat me down and told me I had already committed my time to working on projects with him, and shouldn't run. So I did not run.

Once the Cuomo Tax Caps went through, the Board of Education had much less latitude to give the students what they needed. I was opposed to the idea of the much-discussed prospect of a district merger in that it seemed to me that a key aspect of why Westport was such a good school was its integration with and importance to its community.  

The Cuomo Tax Caps seemed to me intended as town killers: it seemed to me that Cuomo's Albany felt that upstate towns were a budgetary inconvenience and he wanted there to be fewer of them. Had I been on the Board, I would have taken a much more confrontational stance with Albany, defending our town and district. But I had not run for office, and that was not the direction the Board was going.

In 2015 and 2016, my family had about ten years of events in about 18 months. Most notably, I broke my ankle while loading the car to send my son off to college, I was discovered to have a brain tumor, my husband died of an accidental fall while I was awaiting brain surgery, and then a few months later I had brain surgery. We were very suddenly a family in deep crisis.

We were very happy with the Westport School under Michelle Friedman and later Adam Facteau. Josh Meyer as school principal was a completely different story. He was of little to no help with the issues that came up, and often an active hindrance.

I used some of the life insurance money to hire an au pair to try to hold things together to make it possible for my younger child to continue to attend Westport Central School.  After the first semester of high school, the situation became untenable. I became a home schooling parent by necessity while recovering from brain surgery, which was tough. We withdrew from the district we loved because of what I perceived as a near-total absence of problem-solving capacity in the new Principal. Later I quit my job at Wolfram Research, a mathematical software company, so I could focus on home-schooling.

In 2018, we relocated temporarily to Toronto where I earned a Master of Design of Strategic Foresight & Innovation at OCAD University. I finished my degree in 2020, and my younger child graduated from Blyth Academy Yorkville, Toronto, in 2021.

We returned to Westport once it was possible to get vaccinated in the US; we all received our first vaccinations before leaving Canada. In 2023, I completed a Graduate Certificate in Complex Systems and Data Science at the University of Vermont, and in May of 2024, I will complete at Master of Science in the same subject. I am part of the Computational Story Lab at the Vermont Complex Systems Center.

I have had a career as a science fiction editor, mostly working in collaboration with my late husband David Hartwell. I am also an artist, and my first solo art show is running at ADK ArtRise in Saranac Lake through the end of March. My current partner, Ted Cornell (creator of the Art Farm in Wadhams, NY), resides at the nursing  home Elderwood at Ticonderoga, and so I am very well versed in the issues facing the frail elderly in our communities.

If elected, I will seek solutions that bring out the best in what our merged school district has to offer, while working to keep our frail elderly in their homes. I believe that we need a wholistic view of our communities's needs, and that we need to build coalitions to take on Albany to get all of our demographics the support that they deserve.

My recent training in Design School and in Data Science will allow me to facilitate the opening up of ways forward that are not evident to our current Board of Education and its committees. 

The graphic on my forthcoming campaign signs is based on designer Peter Stoyko's icon for the concept of Symmathesy, a work coined by Norah Bateson which means "growing together."

More information

1. My full CV is HERE.
2. The Thriving Communities Plan for the Boquet Valley CSD
3. A first crack at a School Closure bibliography
4. Stones Left Unturned in the BVCSD Futuring Process
5. Notes on a Meeting of the Boquet Valley Central School Board Convened to Discuss Voter Opinions: Why the Proposal to Build a New School Will Never Pass