Diane Greenwood

I come from a family of story tellers. As long as I can remember, we’ve been laughing and crying at stories that we tell each other. These have been the way that we remember our history and the way we deal with our present. The future? It’s simply a story waiting to happen.\n\nMy father was a pastor and his sermons were filled with illustrations and stories. My grandparents and my parents were always using tales of their lives to keep others entertained and my siblings and I continue to do the same thing.\n\nMy college degree is in Music Education and I have been a pianist and singer as long as I can remember. When I was very young, Dad asked a high school girl (who played in our church) to give me piano lessons. She was terrified, but he told her that all he wanted her to do was make sure I loved the piano. If that meant I played with the animals on her farm for most of the lesson, that was fine. She made sure I loved playing the piano with her.\n\nWhen I was working as a Christian Ed and Music Director, my mother called and asked me to go into business with her. She wanted to open a print shop in Omaha, Nebraska. She and Dad would be moving to Council Bluffs for his next church. I went and soon was learning the printing business with Mom and my sister. Mom died three years later and for the next twenty years, my sister and I were print shop owners. When the business closed, I went back into the church and worked as a Communication Director, then returned to college to get my Master’s in Christian Studies.\n\nThose experiences, plus so many more, have brought me to this point in my life, where I find that I finally have an opportunity to write the stories that fill my imagination.