Cathy started playing the family organ at the age of five and experimenting with notes and chords to write her first song when she was six. A few year later she taught herself guitar and joined her local church “folk” choir (guitars and tambourines and really dynamic music!) at ten and eventually became the director, composer, and arranger for the choir in her twenties.

During high school, Cathy had met some fellow sci-fi fans in her classes and for fun they wrote parodies of popular songs while hanging out in the music department at lunchtime and discussing time travel. She had no idea she was writing filk songs; didn’t even know such a genre existed until her husband, Pat, coaxed her down to a filk room at a Chicago convention in 2010. Though horribly nervous at first, she discovered that people liked the original songs she’d been writing for a few decades – though not typically filk at that time – and fell easily into the warmth of this filk family. Though she played circles and eventually concerts solo at first, she found great joy in collaboration with other musicians. She played drums with Toyboat for a decade, founded the Pegasus-winning band Random Fractions, ran filk tracks at a couple conventions, and continues to record solo work and appear as a guest on other people’s recordings.