When I was a young girl, my mother often sat at her typewriter, looking north over the Saskatchewan prairies, writing articles for church magazines and newsletters. I would sit near her, penciling stories on the backs of her discarded yellow foolscript.
My mother, Katie Funk Wiebe, became a well-read Mennonite feminist writer. I obtained a degree in journalism in 1976 from the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, and worked as a writer at the Wichita Eagle & Beacon and The Sun, in Wichita, Kansas. I was a freelance travel writer, and worked a ghostwriter for the William Morris Agency in New York City. From 1984 until 2005, I wrote marketing materials for high-tech companies such as Pitney Bowes, IBM, Apple Computer, Gartner Group, and many more. For three years, I taught technical writing at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. In 2005, I became an Information Architect for Orbitz Worldwide, while simultaneously writing many academic papers in pursuit of my masters degree. The degree achieved, I felt an overwhelming desire to write from my heart for a change, and the fruit of that is my first book, Wild and Precious Life.
