I’m Julia (Jules) McKeown, a story teller, community builder, and now coach. I’m writing this from my front porch where you’ll often find me drinking tea, watching the birds, and writing poetry. A friend of mine recently commented, “your life has so much life in it”. Thinking back on all the adventures I’ve been lucky (and unlucky) enough to have these past 32 years, I’d have to agree.

I grew up speaking two, sometimes three languages. I’ve tasted maple syrup tapped from my New England grandparents’ trees. “Wagon Wheel” (the Old Crow Medicine Show version) makes me cry and I listen to it every time I touch down in North Carolina to visit my parents. I’ll never forget the way Redwoods smell in the rain or how many stars I slept under in the Sahara. Over the years, I’ve learned how to carry home with me into new places, new phases. Tonight on my dinner table, in my beloved Pittsburgh, PA, is my partner’s chicken cacciatore made with my mother’s garden tomatoes, the flatbreads I learned to make from women in Morocco, wine leftover from California, and cookies from a local Italian bakery.

I come to coaching through decades of cross-cultural dialogue and project management work, anthropology and folklore degrees, poetry, and what I (affectionately) refer to as “resting therapist face”. As a perpetual “new kid in town” I’ve spent my life fascinated by how people understand each other and how we learn to understand ourselves.

What stories am I telling? What stories are you telling? What stories are we telling each other? I’ve always been a questioner. In the face of “that’s just the way it is” I can’t help myself from asking: “why? how? says who?”. I’m motivated by the desire to, as the poet Andrea Gibson put it, “carve [my] own heart out of the side of a cliff” and to help others do the same.

(photo credit Molly Robinson)