Lynn Tierney began her career in crisis communications New York City in the early 1980’s as a Media Relations manager with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, owner and operator of John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark International Airport, the World Trade Center, and many other high-profile transportation facilities in the NY-NJ region.

She was first assigned to the Port Authority Police to cover crisis situations ranging from plane crashes, to 750 homeless people living in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, to serving as a key spokesperson for the first terrorist attack on the WTC in 1993.

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In 1996 Lynn was appointed Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Fire Department by Mayor Giuliani and served in that post for 6 years including during 9/11/01.

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Nearly killed in the attacks, she was able to crawl from the rubble by holding on to the belt of her Firefighter aide. As a member of the management team that Mayor Giuliani assembled to help lead the City through the rescue and recovery.

She also handled the families of the 343 firefighters who were killed in the attacks. She wrote and delivered more than 100 eulogies and managed the issues that had never been confronted before by the Department or the City until leaving the FDNY in 2002.

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Lynn recently retired to Owls Head after serving as head of Communications for the 10-campus University of California System. A trained stern man on a lobster boat she claims to “tie a very good knot on the bait bag and bands lobsters with minimal injuries from crusher claws”.

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Isabelle Troadec is a registered nurse, and has been serving Mid-Coast communities working as a homecare nurse since 2014. In her late teens and twenties, Isabelle spent time working on farms, restaurants, odd jobs, and learning how to be a community organizer and activist. From 2005-2006, she worked in the Gulf Coast as a hurricane relief activist, co-founding a small grassroots hurricane relief organization.

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Through nursing, she has come to grow a deeper understanding of how to serve her community. She discovered that honoring the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and experiencing the sacredness of the human experience, was perhaps the foundation of nursing itself. It was and is a privilege to work with people struggling with sudden illness, debilitating diagnoses, the death of a loved one, and supporting people to learn complex medical procedures on which their lives depend.

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Suffering, to some degree, is universal. Despite apparent differences in class, ethnicity, voting records and social habits, we share universal needs and desires for wellness and safety. Ultimately, we are all facing mortality and we are facing ourselves every day.

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Jodi Paloni strives to bring as many of her passions into her work as she can. Formerly a career educator from Vermont, she’s now a writer, editor, workshop leader, and creativity and transition coach working from her home at Bird and Tree Studios in Pemaquid, Maine. Her debut story collection, They Could Live With Themselves, explores the relationship her characters have to self and place, while her art reflects whimsy, a fascination with spirit houses, and the solace she finds in nature. She’s winner of the Short Story America Prize, and a finalist in the Maine Book Award for Fiction and the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. She recently debuted as a visual artist through a collaboration in art and poetry at the 2017 Belfast Poetry Festival.

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Jodi holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, an MS in Environmental Studies from the Antioch New England Graduate School, and certifications from the International Coaching Federation, the Gestalt International Study Center, the Gateless Method of Writing, and Sequencing: Making is Being. Her stories and book reviews appear in a number of journals, on-line and in print. In addition to what you see here, she also loves the ocean and the woods, to cook, to read, and to garden.

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To learn more about Jodi’s work visit her at http://www.jodipaloni.com