About Jennifer
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Click one of the following topics to learn more about me. Family I live with my husband, whom I have been married to for 20-years,
and my 2-year old daughter. My husband is an architect and is very
creative. My daughter has the energy and curiosity of 3 kids rolled
into 1, which I think is wonderful, although I am very tired by
the end of the day. (I stay home with her and write whenever I
can squeeze it into the schedule.)
I was born in Gadsden, Alabama, though I only lived there for a few years. I spent most of my childhood in Decatur, Alabama, where my parents still live today. I had a very happy childhood. My parents spent lots of time with me, my brother, and my sister. We traveled and camped a great deal. We probably visited at least 40 of the 50 (US) states on our travels. Dad spent time with us working on projects such as building a dune buggy, building a treehouse, and making wooden stilts. My mom took us to the library and read to us, which is probably how I came to love books and why I became a writer. I am still very close to my family. We usually get together to visit each other at least once a month. My sisters daughter (my niece), Megan, is 12 years old and she still comes to Nashville to spend a few weeks with me each summer. We enjoy making crafts together. I am also close to my husband’s family. They are more spread out geographically than my family (Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Nashville). We also try to get together several times a year. I have a 5-year old nephew on my husband’s side of the family, Seth, and he loves to read picture books, which is something we both have in common. Education I have a Bachelor’s Degree from Auburn University in Elementary Education. I worked with children in the school systems through a number of labs and internships teaching language arts, science, social studies, math, and music. I taught 3rd graders during my internship. I loved working with the children. I loved creating innovative ways to teach kids the concepts they need to learn. Later after graduating, I did some teaching, however, my heart was really set on writing. I think that writing and teaching are very closely related. Writing is different form of teaching, it just doesn’t involve a classroom.
Jobs During high school and the early college years, I worked part-time at the Wheeler Basin Regional Library. Altogether, I worked at the library for almost 7 years. I liked working at the library. It was a perfect atmosphere for an avid reader and a writer-wannabe. During college, I also worked as an Administrative Assistant and Facilities Manager for the residential complex where we lived. After graduation, I did substitute teaching and worked as a teacher in an elementary school extended-care program at a private school in Nashville. After we travelled to New York and San Francisco, I worked as a writer/editor for 4-years at Rand McNally DocuSystems. After that I worked as a consultant for more than 6 years with Tanner Corporate Services, a communications consulting company, doing writing, editing, and business analysis. (See the Technical and Business Writing page for more information.) Writing My husband and I had lived in Nashville for less than a year when he was assigned to work on a project in New York City. I went with him and we lived in mid-town Manhattan for 6-months. Soon after that project was finished, he was assigned to work on a project in California, so we moved to San Francisco and lived there for a year. It was during all of this moving that I seriously started to think about writing as a career. So I began to write and like most new writers, I had plenty of starts and stops. Since I needed a “paying” job at this point, I decided to work as a technical writer. (That sounds like it was easy, but I taught myself how to write by reading everything I could about technical writing. Then I started at an entry-level position and worked my way up the career ladder.) At this job, I worked full-time and wrote my creative stories on the side. Then after four years, I changed jobs and started working with a technical communications consulting company as a part-time consultant doing writing, editing, and business analysis. I have worked on many different types of projects and I’ve won several awards for my technical writing. Working part-time finally gave me time to do much more writing on my own projects. It was during this period of time that I wrote Kudzu Chaos and many of the other stories I am currently submitting for publication. In my creative writing, I want to write the type of stories that touch people and make them think about the world in a different way. Writing is by far one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but it is also one of the most rewarding. There’s no other feeling like the one you get when you sit down to a blank page, pull an idea out of your head and hammer away at it for several hours, then sit back and read what you’ve written and think, “This is not bad.” Of course there’s ALWAYS much more rewriting and editing left to do before the piece will ever be sent out. But think about it - you’ve created something from nothing! There is nothing more powerful than being the creator of your own world, even if it is only on paper. And the best part is that by sharing this new world with your readers, you are giving them a unique experience they have never had before. Can you tell that I love this job? The first step for me is the idea. It is usually just something I have wondered about or something I have read or something I’ve been exposed to through the routines of everyday life. Before I start writing, I research the topic related to my idea. I exhaustively explore the topic before I ever put pen to paper. Sometimes I end up researching a topic for several years. I have met some writers who would rather have a root-canal than spend all afternoon thumbing through books and articles, but I love the research part of writing. I think the reason I enjoy it so much (other than the fact that I used to work at a library), is because I always write stories around topics that interest me. I figure that if those topics interested me, then there’s probably someone else who will find it interesting as well. When I become saturated in the subject matter, I am able to tell stories that are more realistic and entertaining to my readers. |
My name is Jennifer Holloway Lambe and I live in Nashville, Tennessee.
I have spent the past 11 to 12 years writing in some capacity,
for example,