What turns a Minnesota farm girl into a western Canadian writer with a passion for justice and stewardship? Voracious reading, for a start.<\/p>\n
The family couch grew threadbare in spots as I spent hours and days stretched across it, engrossed in good (and bad) books. Like my mother before me, I discovered that words can transport to experiences far removed from fetching eggs and weeding soybeans\u2014or portray the everyday from new angles.<\/p>\n
My memories of high school centre on a narrow, windowless closet where a handful of us pumped out the Southwest Reflector, <\/em>which expanded under our watch to include a bulletin board of breaking news. Campus journalism figured similarly large in my post-secondary experience, first during two years at Dordt College in Iowa and then at Indiana University, where I earned an MA in journalism.<\/p>\n An internship at the Wall Street Journal <\/em>and a two-year stint at the award-winning Northfield News<\/em> honed my craft. Juggling city hall and sports reporting with the weekly paste-up marathon that predated electronic page design, I learned the joys and anxieties of writing for an audience that cares deeply about what is said.<\/p>\n Moving to Alberta in the early \u201880s, I edited the City of Edmonton\u2019s staff newsletter and then became speech writer for the capital city\u2019s first and only woman mayor. After leading a range of projects while dabbling in teaching and parenting on the side, I quit the city in 1996 and launched Words that Sing, intent on tackling new challenges and diversifying my repertoire.<\/p>\n That\u2019s exactly what has happened. Books. Periodicals. Public relations. Leadership in the writing community. Running a neighbourhood newsletter. And more besides.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My roots are showing What turns a Minnesota farm girl into a western Canadian writer with a passion for justice and stewardship? Voracious reading, for a start. The family couch grew threadbare in spots as I spent hours and days stretched across it, engrossed in good (and bad) books. Like my mother before me, I … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":428,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-200","page","type-page","status-publish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordsthatsing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordsthatsing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordsthatsing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordsthatsing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordsthatsing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordsthatsing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/200\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordsthatsing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordsthatsing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}