An Application for Sudowrite

I'm resurfacing from an unusual time. For the last six years, my primary role was caregiver—first part-time, then full-time—as my father's cancer progressed. It meant stepping away from a career trajectory, putting projects on hold, and learning a different kind of patience and precision.

Like your CLG coach Leah Pearlman, I set aside other work. What started with taking him to appointments evolved into helping him walk (and carving him a dragon-headed wizard staff worthy of Gandalf), reading Arthur C. Clarke aloud, and eventually, sleeping on the couch in his room so I could be there whenever he woke at 3 AM. Being there with him at the end, with my mother and sister, holding him.

It was the hardest and most meaningful work I've ever done. And it taught me that the most important design happens in the spaces between intention and action. It’s about understanding what people really need, not just what they say they want. Your mention of CLG, of working through feelings and "stories we tell ourselves," resonates deeply. That conscious, human-centered approach is not just a philosophy for me; it's a lived experience.

Your search for a "Product Designer who loves to write" isn't just a nice-to-have for me—it's the organizing principle of my entire career. I've spent my life at the crossroads where language meets visual art, where stories become tangible.

As a Writer & Worldbuilder

With an MFA in Creative Writing and publications in places like the Washington Post, I understand the writing process from the inside. But my love for storytelling goes beyond the page. For years, I've been building Vaïma—an inclusive fantasy world with its own languages, cultures, and history—and creating artifacts that make the imaginary feel real.

As a Designer & Illustrator

My design skills developed organically to serve storytelling. At the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, I hand-coded their website for accessibility. For the literary journal FOLIO, I art-directed and designed the full 30th Anniversary issue. And through my "Writers in Person" series, I illustrated authors live as they read, turning the solitary act of reading into a shared, visual experience.

I've been watching Sudowrite for years, drawn in by your deep respect for the craft. Most AI tools feel like they're trying to replace writers. Sudowrite feels like it's trying to give writers superpowers. I believe AI can be a true collaborator—not a replacement for imagination, but an amplifier of it.

I've spent hundreds of hours experimenting with LLMs, developing my own prompt engineering workflows, and thinking about how these interfaces could work better. I have strong opinions about what "agentic" AI should and shouldn't do. The best ones feel like really good writing partners: they suggest, support, and remember, but never forget whose story it is.

Experiments in AI & Animation

Here are a few experiments exploring AI-assisted creativity, animation, and storytelling.

My "weird" background—Japanese translation, TV news production, teaching on a ship circling the globe—makes sense here. It's all been about translation: moving meaning between different systems, cultures, and people. That's the same skill needed to make complex LLMs feel intuitive to a novelist who just wants to deepen their characters.

You're building something I believe in: AI as a creative collaborator, not a destroyer of worlds. You're doing it as writers, for writers. You talk about your fears. You share your feelings and your profits. You believe that small is beautiful.

This feels like a place where I could bring my whole self: the writer, the designer, the caregiver, the worldbuilder, the person who thinks AI can help us tell better stories about ourselves and each other. I'm drawn to your commitment to staying small and meaningful rather than scaling into irrelevance. After years in caregiving mode, I'm ready and excited to pour all that accumulated insight and energy into something that helps other people create.