Margot Silk Forrest is an author, artisan, speaker, and crafts teacher. Her mission in life is to add love to the world.

Margot is the author of Sassy Feet! How to Paint, Bead, Bedeck, and Embellish Your Shoes and A Short Course in Kindness.

She is co-author of The Soul in the Computer: Story of a Corporate Revolutionary , and EMDR: The Breakthrough Therapy for Overcoming Anxiety, Stress and Trauma.

Margot was also the founder of "The Healing Woman", an acclaimed newsletter and international self-help organization for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. She was formerly a top-ranked manager at Hewlett-Packard, and a news editor for the San Jose Mercury News, the Dallas Times-Herald, and the Philadelphia Bulletin. She lives in Central California.

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Margot's Journey to Authorship, Kindness, and the Shoe-It-Yourself Movement

Like all good writers, Margot has had an abundance of unusual jobs in addition to those that appear on her resume. These include freelance photographer, fabric artist, seamstress, ski lodge bookkeeper, photography columnist, tour guide, barmaid in a GI bar, and sales clerk at Liberty's of London. In her spare time, she sews, paints, reads mysteries, plays with her cats, adores her partner, and enjoys all the benefits of living in one of the most beautiful places in the world-the coast of California.

Margot grew up in Philadelphia and attended Sarah Lawrence College in New York and Williams College in Massachusetts. Following her graduation she traveled extensively in Europe where she lived and worked for the next six years.

After returning to the U.S., she spent the next six years working as a journalist, first as a copy editor then as a news editor, on the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Dallas Times-Herald, and the award-winning San Jose Mercury News.

In 1984, Margot joined the Hewlett-Packard Company as a senior writer, then became a project manager and senior writing consultant. In 1991 she left to found The Healing Woman, a monthly journal for women in recovery from childhood sexual abuse. She built this into a widely respected publication with 17,000 readers in all 50 states and 14 countries. In 1996 she turned the organization into a non-profit, The Healing Woman Foundation, to take over the work she started of providing inspiration and support to women in recovery from childhood abuse.

During her years with The Healing Woman, Margot made frequent media appearances and gave inspirational speeches about how to turn a difficult childhood into a dynamic future. She appeared on TV, addressed national conferences on psychology and personal growth, taught at Esalen Institute, and published numerous audio tapes of her talks.

In the last half of the 1990s, Margot co-authored two books, EMDR: The Breakthrough Therapy and The Soul in the Computer: Story of a Corporate Revolutionary.

Following their publication, she worked very successfully as a freelance book editor for people who had wonderful things to teach the world but were not professional writers. She wrote and edited book proposals, rewrote and/or edited fiction and non-fiction manuscripts, and worked with established literary agents to polish manuscripts for submission. From 1997 to 2006, Margot worked on more than 25 manuscripts in the areas of psychology, personal growth, spirituality, memoir, consumer health, popular fiction (including a mystery and two thrillers), and business. Every one of her clients was able to find an agent, if they so desired, and many had their work published.

In 2003, Margot's third book was published. A Short Course in Kindness: a little book on the importance of love and relative unimportance of just about everything else was widely featured in daily newspapers and on radio. Its foreword was graciously written by Catherine Ryan Hyde, author of Pay It Forward. It was named a Book of the Year finalist by both ForeWord magazine and the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

In typical Margot fashion, her next project took a completely different direction. Long interested in sewing and crafts, Margot noticed one day in 2005 that a bottle of fabric paint she had been using to paint and stencil a sweatshirt was also guaranteed to work on leather. Mischievous little lights went on in her head:
Three years later, she had designed more than 100 DIY shoes, written a book about it, was teaching private classes, and speaking to groups and conferences. For the rest of the story, go to www.SassyFeet.com.