Give me a job, please!: Storyteller, art lover, wordsmith, and factory tour enthusiast

Give me a job, please!: Storyteller, art lover, wordsmith, and factory tour enthusiast

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Laura Browning is the latest job-seeker to take part in the “Give me a job, please!” series.‚  Thoughts, ideas, leads for her, post them here‚ . (If you’re currently unemployed and want to be a part of this series, email us here.) Name: Laura M. Browning Looking for work as: Writer/editor (on a full-time or project basis) for non-profits, magazines, or organizations with connections to the arts or environment. Please sum up your life experience in 140 characters or less. I’m curious. Intellectually stimulating experiences open up my world and allow me to be storyteller, art lover, wordsmith, factory tour enthusiast and more. What kind of job are you looking for? Writing/editing for organizations with employees who work hard, have fun, and believe that what they are doing is making the world a little better. I love digging into long feature articles and finding stories in the everyday. I’m also experienced at cutting through jargon to write memorable member newsletters, annual reports, and other marketing collateral. When have you thought “outside the box”?‚  Also, using descriptive words, please describe the box. My first job was cleaning out litter boxes at a cats-only boarding facility in Dallas. I think I’ll skip the description of that box. But then there was the time I wrote an essay about graffiti in Chicago, and I decided to approach it as art rather than brightly colored street periphery or gang tags or community-painted murals. Could graffiti offer an experience similar to an art museum? Could a crumbling viaduct on Chicago’s South Side really bring sacredness to a forgotten graffiti mural the way museum walls would to an early Georgia O’Keeffe painting? The first thing I do when I start to write is to describe the box. What’s the obvious approach? You have to recognize the box before it will open up. It might seem dark and uncompromising, but writing allows me to find a window or skylight and clamber out of it. Rumor has you copy edited an episode of “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” — what’s up with that? It was actually the printed program they hand out at the live tapings, not a transcript of an episode (but if those are available”¦). I’m a devoted WWDTM listener, and I took my dad to a live taping this past February. I took the program home and copy edited the entire thing, which was enormously satisfying. Yes, I may have some slight obsessive-compulsive tendencies. What else should we know about you? My favorite punctuation mark is the serial comma. I’ve run eight half-marathons. I am currently working on an essay about my love of factory tours — the best one was the Sechler Pickle Factory in St. Joe, Indiana. Did you know Frank Sinatra used to order his pickles from them? You can follow me on Twitter (I’m @ellembee), check out samples of my writing at www.ArtCantHurtYou.com, and email me at lmbrowning@gmail.com.