In which

Novelist wanders globe searching for belonging, finds WordPress

Like The Ugly Duckling in the famous Hans Christian Andersen fable, I was born to be a writer—I just didn’t always know that.

Instead, I wandered from barnyard to barnyard, lived with wild ducks and geese, joined different flocks, and tried to find my purpose. I worked as an assistant in the newsroom for a daily newspaper, as a manager at Nordstrom, joined the United States Air Force, started a marketing agency in Seattle, supported a husband off to war, and in between wrote poetry, short stories and a novel.

Then one day, I discovered WordPress. And I fell in love. I created a blog and I started blogging. I would like to tell you that my story ends here, but it would still be a long journey home before I would begin my real WordPress adventure. (There wouldn’t be a story here after all, if it ended quickly and happily ever after.)

A thrifty weed poking through concrete

From my early days reading and memorizing passages from my King James Bible (a literary masterpiece) to writing poetry at eight, to working on my high school newspaper, I have always loved language and publishing. Even in jobs that weren’t traditionally publishing-related I still managed to find ways to publish, like a thrifty weed poking through concrete. At Nordstrom, I created a newsletter called Nordy News to highlight employee accomplishments, that I hand-typed. I got to present it to Bruce Nordstrom.

Over the years, I have had the amazing experience to see publishing evolve— from making poetry chapbooks, to cutting and pasting galley sheets over light tables, to dragging and dropping text and images in real time, online.

A very ugly website

It often takes many iterations to create a finished work of art. Often, the first attempts are the “shitty first drafts” as Ann Lamott says. I created my first website in 1996 for Vemo, a construction engineering client, and felt frustrated when the vision I sketched could not be executed. I gobbled up the book “Publish it On the Web” by Bryan Pfaffenberger and “The Web Page Design Cookbook” so I could create a site with rudimentary columns, reminiscent of the newspapers I created.

Steal like an artist

Now, the capabilities for an online presence are nearly endless and I find myself working late, absorbing all I can. I discovered WordPress.com in 2011 and started a blog called Pointillistically Sublime because I fell in love with the word pointillistically after reading Aleida Rodriguez’s poem, Lexicon of Exile. I transferred to WordPress.org about a year ago and I have been building WordPress sites ever since. I love playing around with plugins and widgets and using WordPress theme detectors to learn about sites I love so that I can “Steal Like An Artist,” as Austin Kleon says, to create amazing websites. I’ve worked with small businesses for more than twenty years and I see WordPress as an essential hub to transform service to customers. Thus, I have been retooling my business to share WordPress wonders with others.

Learning customer service at Nordstrom

I like to say I am a curiosity driven life-long learner. I’ve studied French, new urbanism, organic gardening, international development, economics, rhetorical grammar, poetry, novel writing, business, creativity and innovation and how to change parts on my 1999 Subaru Outback. While I have read many books (including several about customer service, such as Soul Talk, E-myth, Start with Why, The Nordstrom Way, What Clients Love) I really learned customer service when I worked at Nordstrom and quickly won Customer Service All-Star. Like Automattic, Nordstrom is a company based on customer service and its only rule is to make customers happy. I jumped in knowing nothing about retail and thrived because I loved people and I loved learning.

On being the oldest of seven

Chuck Yeager once said “there is no such thing as a natural born pilot.”

Yeager claimed growing up on the farm gave him the attention to detail he needed to become a great pilot. I think growing up in a large family and being the oldest of seven siblings is where I gained my customer service ethos. From an early age, I helped my mom with my younger siblings, and even took the first class hour in high school to stay home to get my brother and sisters up and off to school. Every job I’ve ever had pivoted around customer service, from my first job in the newsroom at the local daily newspaper, to the various businesses I’ve owned and operated over the years, to the work I do in my community today. I’ve started community connections groups, where my theme was about caring, connecting and communicating, and I’ve used that theme as a natural extension of who I am.

Serving veterans with PTSD

I’ve been privileged to be part of several amazing customer support experiences, including Nordstrom, but I think the work I do at Central Washington Veterans Counseling is what I am most proud of. I support our amazing counselors and the many veterans who come to us seeking help with post-traumatic stress disorder and its multitude of symptoms, so they can live happy, productive lives. No job is too small for me, from cleaning toilets to changing locks on doors, to assisting in writing treatment plans and psycho-socials, billing and contracts. Because of my strong desire to learn and my natural curiosity, one of my strengths is coming up to speed in an organization fairly quickly. At CWVC, I quickly learned the language of therapy as well as compassionate ways to work with our clients. It is truly a privilege to help our nation’s veterans.

A Canadian online community

I came to learn and to love WordPress after joining Wealthy Affiliate, an online community created by a couple of young guys from Canada. I was working toward Ambassador by helping other members, but since selling my home and moving I’ve been focused a bit more on unpacking my boxes and boxes and boxes of books. At WA, we learn to create WordPress websites.

Another online community I contributed to was The Battered Women’s Justice Project online learning community, where I helped write a training module for non-military members working in the field of domestic violence. Since 2009, I have gone back to school to earn two bachelor’s degrees, almost entirely online and have contributed to many support communities in all of the classes I took, where discussion boards helped us work together from places around the globe.

Too serious for Kindergarten

I have always been driven to succeed, and in fact, my kindergarten teacher wrote on one of my progress reports that I was too serious. For some reason, I gravitate toward learning all I can about where ever I find myself, and to excelling in that arena. So from early on, I challenged myself to learn and to grow and to overcome my weaknesses. When I was younger, I was very shy, so in the ninth grade I decided that I had too many things to accomplish where my shyness would hold me back and I needed to change that. So I signed up for drama class. I’ve been involved in toastmasters, and I studied Method acting for many years, something I thoroughly enjoyed, especially Improv for its amazing spark of creativity.

What I am most proud of (besides my 18-year old home schooled son, Robert, and surviving all that I’ve endured since 9/11) is the opportunity I had to work with the famed poet, Marge Piercy in her juried poetry workshop in Wellfleet, Mass. I learned of her workshop after taking Derek Sheffield’s Creative Writing course, where I resonated with Piercy’s work. This led to a transformative life experience, and, gave me the courage to apply. I spent a week with eleven other poets, learning poetry, reading and wandering around Wellfleet.

When it comes to working schedules, I have become more of a night owl. I used to be an early bird, but these days I am usually up late working on my blog or other learning projects. I get engrossed in working on projects so I would be thrilled to work non-traditional times.

The job just sounded so delectable

While browsing the Automattic website, the words “Happiness Engineer” jumped out at me. The job just sounded so delectable, and reminded me of my days at Nordstrom helping customers there, and how much I love WordPress. I read through the a8cday blog and really enjoyed the article, “So You Want to be a Happiness Engineer, Huh?” I loved Ma.tt’s post “We Called it Gutenberg for a Reason” with its history of the printing press and publishing and how it is so essential to democracy, something we journalists love.  I resonate with the people, feeling like I have found my Swans.

Self directed learner

I signed up for the support site and would love to volunteer. I’ve taught myself a bit of html and CSS and am in the process right now of learning all I can about WordPress, SEO and digital marketing. There is just so much to learn, it’s like being in a candy store.

I would welcome the opportunity to share my passion and to contribute to the team at Automattic and all the amazing products and tools created and being developed into the future.

“and then there is all that you have learned. The power of what you have learned enables you to do the next thing and it enables you to do the next thing better. — Jony Ive”

The above quote on Ma.tt’s blog sums up the hero’s journey embodied in the Ugly Duckling. I believe life is in the journey, a cumulative product of life’s wanderings, successes and failures. So all those lamented barn yard travails were all worth the effort.

I look forward to hearing from you soon and to continuing my learning journey. (And to become amazing at .gifs too.)

And, to helping Automattic “make the web a better place for more than a billion people each month.”

Leita Crossfield

Pacific StandardPS. Wenatchee, Washington would make a beautiful addition to your world-map. It’s full of adventures, nature and four seasons.

PSS. It’s ok if you write code better than Haiku. I write poetry too.