I can’t quite bring myself to get rid of the ocean photos here. It’s too depressing, especially since it’s getting cold (brrr) in D.C., where I’m residing these days.

It’s summer in DC now! Not cold any longer. But I still like the ocean photos so I’m going to leave them up for now if you don’t mind.

you can reach me at aringreenwood at hotmail.com
or find me hanging out in the ocean shivering by the radiator sweltering in Rock Creek Park

but email’s probably better

As for me, the person who in a pique of narcissism decided to put up a website using her own name as a domain name: I am a freelancer. A peripatetic, wanderlustful sort of person who freelances as a writer, lawyer, LSAT prep teacher, think tank paper-writer, and occasional dog walker. Among other things. The freelance life is pretty wonderful, I must say, for the sheer diversity of projects a person gets to work on. And for other reasons. But I really do love the variety.

Let’s start with the freelance legal work: It’s hard to believe for so many reasons, but I got my law degree from Columbia University’s law school back in 2000, am admitted to the New York bar, and have eight years of increasingly broad legal experience - including appellate experience, a two-year clerkship, time as a refugee protection judge, and a fairly brief stint as a litigator at a law firm in New York. As such, I do freelance legal research and writing projects for lawyers, law firms, and legal-oriented journals. I’m now teaching LSAT prep classes, too, to smart young things who for reasons I can’t quite fathom want to go to law school themselves. As of late I’ve started writing analytical papers about bad laws for a DC-based think tank, too.

And now about the writing: I am a curious dilettante (read: ADD-ridden!) and because of this I write about nearly everything, including law, travel, pets, history, ghosts, scams, truck drivers, neighborhoods, hemp, prison food, health, neuroscience, historic preservation, television, Japanese indie punk, and more. Some of the publications I write for are the Washington CityPaper, the American Bar Association Journal, All Nippon’s inflight magazine, The Bark, the Providence Phoenix, Preservation Online, and many more. Some of my stories are on this site; most aren’t, so if you’d like to read more just send me an email and I’ll get some un-internetted stories over to you.

I have also written a novel called Tropical Depression, about a spunky young lawyer named Nina Barker who hightails it to the tropics in the wake of personal and professional disaster, and who finds that life in paradise is no less complicated than life in New York, it’s just warmer, weirder, and more likely to result in Death by Parasail Rope Snapping and/or Death by SCUBA. There are also some finely crafted cockfighting scenes in my novel, which you are sure to enjoy, as well as what I hope is a Truthful and Entertaining look at an indigenous island culture that is struggling to define itself in the wake of facile political choices that have left the culture on the brink of extinction. I am told the novel is right on the line of literary and commercial fiction, which I’d think would double my readership rather than making my book unsellable, but we shall see. My wonderful agent, Stephanie Lee of Manus & Associates Literary Agency, is shopping my novel around right now - please (please!!!!) contact me or she if you’d like to read it.

Oh, and to answer lingering questions: I am female. Yes, even with a name like Arin. Thank you, Mom and Dad.

moreover, this is my dog Barky

is she the cutest dog you’ve ever seen or what?

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and this is my cat Arnold

who is a little bit vicious, truth be told