Monday, June 23, 2008

Introducing myself

Greetings,

Here I write in my pajamas, after a long, exhausing weekend of camping in eastern Kansas! Kansas - Overland Park, namely - is my new home. My husband, Bryan, accepted a job in this suburb of Kansas City, which began June 2. He's an engineer, a straight and logical thinker (ha!). We get a kick out of making fun of each other because we're so different. (Yesterday, for example, I was writing in my journal by the campfire and he asked what I was writing about. I told him I was thinking about nakedness and all it implied. He thought that was weird.)

Anyway, we moved here from Indiana just over a month ago, following Bryan's graduation from Purdue University. While he finished school, I was the "breadwinner" for a couple of years, pulling in the big bucks as a staff writer for a local daily newspaper. I worked on the crime beat - quite the challenge for a quiet, mild-tempered girl who grew up in a tiny Wyoming town where crime was more or less a foreign concept. My "crime reporting" experience certainly broadened my horizons: I wrote about dumb criminals jumping over snowbanks to get away with a pair of stolen nail clippers, covered the trial of a drug-dealing man whose arm was shot off in a police raid, and plenty more in between! This summer, as we switch roles and my husband starts pulling in the big(ger) bucks, I am finishing a family history and doing freelance work as time allows, until school starts in August!

I received my undergrad in English from Gustavus Adolphus College, a small liberal arts school in southern Minnesota, in 2006. Got married that summer in the mountains where I grew up, then moved to Indiana, and now we're here, in the suburbs of Kansas City. Someday, eventually, we'll settle down ... actually plant our own roots somewhere.

I look forward to hearing your own stories and meeting you in August!

2 comments:

DLowe said...

Kate,
What an interesting intro. I'm from a tiny North Dakota town (McHenry, Home of the Famous Turn-around Railroad Loop! Oh gosh, it's just super.) and enjoyed hearing of your Midwestern roots -- guess crime is still as out of hand as I remember it. :) I am familiar with Gustavus Adolphus College as I think they used to be on the basketball schedule of my old school -- North Dakota State University (1983). I graduated this spring from WCSU's MFA program and I hope you get as much out of it as I did. Be sure you take time to meet Kathy Belby at the residency -- another Midwesterner from a small town.
Best Wishes,
Don Lowe

Aaliyah said...

Kate,

Nice intro and an interesting background. I look forward to meeting you too! Welcome to West Conn's MFA in Professional Writing.

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