I’m Penny, and I’d like to hear from you. I’m the new Clearwater and Clear Lake area staff writer/photographer for the Citizen-Tribune. I’m excited to work with the great staff here and to get to know all of you out there.

 

Before you trust me with your lives, it’s only fair you know a bit about mine.

 

I’ve lived in the Clearwater area for 23 years, but I’m originally from the small town of Wendell, MN, current population 167, just south of Fergus Falls. It was an idyllic place to grow up as a child but not much fun for a teenager. The school I attended was combined with the neighboring town of Elbow Lake but I still graduated with only 37 classmates, one of which was our German foreign exchange student.

 

I went to college for advertising and design and have held a number of positions in the field, including graphic designer for a newspaper in White Bear Lake, layout and design artist and creative supervisor for Herberger’s Department Store, account executive at Hatling & Thomas advertising and marketing agency, and most recently, 13 years as an instructor in the Advertising Communication & Design program at St. Cloud Technical and Community College. I love working with young adults and probably learned as much from them as they learned from me. 

 

Along with my new position at the Citizen-Tribune, I’m taking online classes to further my education and teaching a variety of art classes through the Great River Regional Library System. I’m also a freelance writer, artist and photographer.

 

My husband and I live a few miles south of Clearwater, have three daughters, ages 22, 19 and 14, three dogs and two cats. I enjoy gardening, both flowers and vegetables, and preserve much of what I grow to enjoy during the winter months. I love to travel to new places, read (my favorite authors are Diana Gabaldon and Stephen King), write, take photographs and create art of all kinds.

 

My passion is creativity. So much so that I created a seminar I call “Rock Your Creativity” that I hold to help people and businesses develop theirs. I believe everyone is creative in his or her own way, they just have to discover it. Trust me.

 

I enjoy meeting new people and talking with them. People who know me now may have a hard time believing it, but as I child I was actually quite shy and introverted. It wasn’t until high school that I became more confident in myself and broke out of my shell. I haven’t stopped talking since.

 

My favorite season is spring, everything about it makes my heart feel lighter. My least favorite is winter due to it being dark, grey and dreary. My favorite holiday is the 4th of July (fireworks!), but Halloween is my favorite to decorate for.

 

I’m extremely claustrophobic and scared of heights and spiders. I hate anything mocha, including coffee, and love plain water and Coke Zero. I don’t feel like I’m a picky eater, but a co-worker once secretly kept a list of food I won’t eat which expanded into three full pages, much of it food most people enjoy like baked beans and bananas.

 

I’m a penny-pincher and hate shopping unless I’m getting great deals. My family calls me the stock-up queen because whenever I find a good deal on food items and products like toothpaste I’ll buy it, even if I already have 10 of the same thing at home. Don’t judge. They’ll get used eventually.

 

Enough about me, I want to hear about all of you. If you have an interesting Clearwater/Clear Lake story to share or have an idea for one, contact me. My goal is to get you to know, understand and care about your local community, and I promise to always do my best. Remember, the newspaper is your community. We want to talk to you and tell your stories because local matters, and without you there would be no us.