Who am I?
Hi! My name’s Roberta Laurie.
According to family lore, someone once asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I answered, “I am going to be a bookmaker.”
I won my first writing competition when I was 16. CKUA turned my story into a radio play, and I made more money than I’d ever made before: $150 (about $450 nowadays). Since then, life has taken me down a twisting path, but I’ve never given up on writing.
When I was 40 (after a stint co-owning a kung fu studio), I went back to school and got a degree in professional writing. After that, I just kept going. I received a Master of Arts in Environmental Education and Communication from Royal Roads University in 2013, and in 2015, the University of Alberta Press published Weaving a Malawi Sunrise, a book that took me 8 years to research, write, and edit (more on that in future posts).
Since 2010, I’ve been teaching in the Bachelor of Communication Studies program at MacEwan University. I’ve taught a lot of subjects over the years: rhetoric, grammar, sustainability communication, creative nonfiction,… but for the past year, I’ve been able to cut back on my teaching so that I can write more aaaaannnd… move off-grid. That’s right. I now live in the middle of no where and survive in the online world thanks to StarLink.
It hasn’t been all walks in the forest and poetry readings by the light of a kerosene lamp, but it’s where I’m meant to be, and thanks to less teaching, I can now bring you this newletter.
The Little Chatterbox
My dad (grandfather) once gave me a book he’d had as a kid. It was called Chatterbox. I liked the sound of the word then, and I like it now — chatterbox. It’s a bit musical, a bit nostalgic, and it definitely describes me.
In this Substack, I’ll share my writing experiences (especially in memoir writing). Writing can be a superpower, so I’ll also be sharing tips to help you make your writing pop: whether you’re writing press releases or steampunk fantasy.
I’ll also be writing about my rambles in nature, and odds and bobs about my childhood, which was a bit…um…unusual, but more on that later.
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