Life Background
My life background includes business management; copywriting for radio; reporting, writing, and display ad design for newspaper; weekly column writer; published author; entrepreneur; pianist, accompanist, teacher; marketing director; communications in a variety of venues.
Poetry Passion
Poetry is a passion which began while attending Harding Jr. High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. My English teacher (also named Pam) introduced me and the class to poets e.e. cummings and Piet Hein. I’ve been writing ever since. My poems are described as “short and lyrical which follow in the tradition of such well-known American poets as Hugh Prather and Rod McKuen in their exploration of love as the most basic of human emotions and literary etudes employing nature as an instrument for reasoning in an attempt to understand life.”
More Passion
My other passions include family, technology, learning, music, (all of which I am a master of none), and my best friend, Q (1947-2019).
Writer
As an author of short stories and poetry, my work has been published by Dorrance & Company in their Contemporary Poets series, several times in “Lyrical Iowa” (an annual Anthology of the Iowa Poetry Association), “Virtue Magazine,” and locally as a weekly columnist in The Oskaloosa Herald. The self-published book “Calendar Poems” self-published and is available on Blurb.com.
Work History
In 1998 I left my position as Communications Director for the Oskaloosa Area Chamber & Development Group to walk down a new life path. Working with Chamber members, I realized small businesses and individuals in the area needed a workmate to help write and tell their stories; someone who could be a colleague when putting together marketing materials and advertising messages when budgets were tight or marketing departments non-existent; someone who could step in and provide business support services in a variety of settings without those businesses having to invest in marketing and design departments of their own. It was with this realization The Write Design was born.