Who am I?

It’s the pivotal question Jean Valjean asks of himself in the musical Les Miserables and the first question you’re probably asking yourself if you don’t know me and are reading this blog for the first time.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Loey Werking Wells, and I’m a writer who’s written a short story collection, a couple of screenplays, countless articles, a blog and a few novels that are buried in the bottom of a desk drawer, where they should probably stay. I’ve also been married for almost 24 years, which makes me a wife, a mom to a college-aged student, and stay-at-home mom to a golden retriever. Along the way I’ve picked up a degree from the University of Montana and a law degree from the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis and Clark College. I’ve lived in Oregon, California, Montana, Colorado, the Netherlands and Seoul, Korea.

I’m also a world traveler. Back in 2005 I started a blog that chronicled an around-the-world trip when our kid was eight. We sold everything we owned, put what we didn’t sell into a 10×10 storage unit and my husband quit his job. Though we felt like we had an adequate safety net, many around us thought we had lost our minds. At certain points of our trip, we felt the same. But, one can only take so many trips before it becomes a bit obnoxious or financially ruinous, so while I loved our travel-themed blog, and I occasionally wrote about non-travel topics, it soon became confining. At the same time blogging had become so common, that I didn’t feel the drive to continue, plus I was in the throes of an international move, getting my kid into college and writing the aforementioned stories.

So why start a new blog now? Mostly because I have a lot to say and my friends are probably going to be relieved when I rail at an invisible audience on the computer, and not in their faces while we take our walks. For my writing practice I feel that blogging is what practicing scales is for a pianist. Something that warms up whatever engine resides in my brain that makes my fingers type and the thoughts manifest. I’m going to be writing about so many things, but the common thread is how they relate to story. Movie, books and TV shows will be some things I’ll touch on, but so will travel, politics, raising a young adult and a senior dog. I know that all sounds haphazard, but trust me, or as my friend Athena says, trust the story. It will all come together.

Ready? I hope so. It’s gonna be one hell of an adventure. You may learn something, you might even feel something and I hope you’ll even be prodded to think in a new way.