Today we introduce the new community writers who'll contribute to the Our Lives column.
Starting this week is Patricia Wigington, a married mom of a 4-year-old and a 16-year-old. She's unemployed, a laid-off IBMer in search of work who always wanted to be a writer and was an English major in college. "I thought this was a good opportunity to get back in," she says of Our Lives. Patricia lives near Garner, outside of Raleigh, and she will explore the area in her column: the little stores and the people of "what seems like you're in the country but is really not."
Next week, you'll meet Lisa Rubenstein, a public school teacher in Durham who teaches ninth-grade English. Lisa says she wanted to write her column because she wants to be rich and famous and "I thought this was a way to achieve this." She laughed. So did we. But she also writes letters to friends, the kind you mail, and when she does, her friends say she should make a book. "This will be an effort to write public letters to people who are not my friends," she says. "I'll write letters to the newspaper." Lisa doesn't have a theme in mind for her essays, but in a way, she says diversity is a theme for her. She grew up with a father in the foreign service and so has the perspective of an American who grew up outside of America. She is married, her husband teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill, and they have three daughters. She also doesn't comb that curly hair.
Following Lisa is Diane Morris, a writer and editor for the N.C. Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy organization for low- and moderate-income people. She lives in Raleigh with her husband and two sons, whom she home-schools. In fact, her sons will play a prominent part in her columns, as they do in her life: Both boys have autism. "People have different impressions of children with autism and what autism means," she says. "Autism doesn't mean you're quirky; it's not being a little different. In our case, our boys have very serious challenges." But they are joyous too. People don't see her sons when they think of autism, she says. "I don't want pity, but I would like a little more understanding. I want them to see what our life is like."
And finally, there's Alice Osborn. About seven years ago, she was in retail; now she is a consultant offering editing and writing services to small businesses. That kind of change is one of the themes she'd like to explore in her column, and, as the married mother of two, the work and family balance. "I'm constantly challenged by that," she says. But she'd like to share little observations, too. Like how she was at the store with a full cart of groceries and everyone else seemed to have soda and frozen pizza. "I thought: Am I the only one married?" She has wanted to be a part of Our Lives for a while. "I'm a longtime reader of the N&O, and I like it, and I want to be a part of it."
