About Corinna

I work at a little white wooden writing desk a friend handed down to me when times were tough.  It has a simple painted wooden chair with a black fabric seat.  It means a lot to me.  I treasure it and her.

I use a laptop my sweet honey conjured up for me with his expert electrical-engineer know-how.  It means a lot to me, too, and I treasure him.

He's been asking me what I want to do, as in what do I want to be when I grow up, what makes me feel useful, inspired, and alive?  For a strange variety of reasons, it's been a very difficult question to answer.  I went almost back to the beginning to see if I could come up with the answer.

When I was a little girl one of my favorite toys was 'my typewriter'.  It wasn't really a typewriter - no paper, no bail - but it had keys with letters, numbers, and pictures on them, and little tabs that popped up with a corresponding picture or symbol when you pressed them down. They clicked like real typewriter keys.  I remember how the keys felt under my pudgy fingers, and how grown-up I felt when I could make it sound like my grandma's did.

After I'd loved most of the paper labels off those keys, I became enamored with our wondrous set of World Book encyclopedias.  The coffee-brown, vinyl-like-leather bindings with their gold lettering were so regal on the shelf.  I spent many hours 'copying' from the pages, even before I could really read or write. Pencil and paper were my companions, from the pre-school 'Soundie' packets via the county superintendent to the backs of outdated forms from grandpa's tax office.  Copying pages out of the dictionary would have been a welcome punishment if I'd needed it in school.

So when schooling formed me into a good speller, a happy conjugator, and a whiz with grammar, I became a habitual editor.  As I grew older, the local newspaper would be a real challenge for me to read without marking it up in red ink.  As by chance I was able to work with the publisher/editor as an adult, and as he was able to tell me in person that his favorite college professor told him (I swear this is true) that "if they can figure out what you are trying to say it's good enough,"  I was humbly obliged to quell my proofreading penchant and spend my time on more important things.  It's funnier now, but not much.

I am schooled in Business, with both college credits and life experience.  I've owned or co-owned a greenhouse, a trucking company, a car wash, a lumber yard, an antique store and several hobby projects that brought in small amounts of cash.  I've worked for a clothier, a grocer, a baker, a publisher, an auctioneer, the USPS, a custom harvester, neighbors and friends, a lumber man, my dad, and my inlaws (and most recently in my new urban home for an event planner and an oil company.)  They required written communication of various kinds and forms, forms, forms.  They were the folks that needed me, in the quiet rural place we lived and made our living doing what needed to be done.

I still feel peaceful and centered with paper and pencil in hand.  Lists, comments, notes, explanations, charts, descriptions, reflections, drawings, rants, or greetings - and I'll remember it if I write it down, even if I never see it again (well, by and large). So with this strange variety of experiences I come away from a place and time where opportunities were always enhanced by reading and writing well, but never really depended on it, to a place where it's time to put these skills in front and reach out to folks who need a humble, gentle, happy reader and writer.