Since my early 20s, I’ve earned a living as a writer. It was a modest living but I was thrilled to survive doing something I loved. As a staff journalist for a daily newspaper, I covered the fashion beat in a city best known for its quirky independence so introduced a street fashion feature where I asked interestingly-dressed strangers what they were wearing and why. When I realized how much people imbue clothes with meaning, I was hooked!
Trends were interesting but what I enjoyed most of all was getting to know people involved in the fashion business. I interviewed globally successful designers including Oscar de la Renta, Tommy Hilfiger, Diane von Furstenberg, and Michael Kors, and loved highlighting the personal stories of creative, independent, small-batch, makers in Portland, Oregon. People engaged in any creative process interest me.
Through my years as a journalist, I followed doctors into the operating room, talked over coffee with teenage prostitutes, uncovered a long con that landed the perpetrator in prison, dined at fancy galas, and attended more New York Fashion Week shows than is good for the psyche.
I grew up on a comfortable blue collar block in a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis, MN. I saved every penny I earned at the mall, bought a round trip ticket to Italy, and took off to see the world! I backpacked overland through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India to Nepal. I was 18 years old. More than three years passed before I returned to the USA. I met the man who would become my husband on that trip. We are still married. We both began freelance writing which led to more stable staff positions, and then he went into corporate communications about 15 years ago. We’re now on the precipice of old age, if not already wallowing in its depths, and have two amazing adult daughters.
Decades ago, I met an old artist who woke every morning to shuffle down the hallway to his studio to paint. He was good, successful even, but not particularly well known.
Being creative was his purpose. The idea has sat comfortably with me ever since.
