Maren S Showkeir's Biography

Born in a southwestern town that went from being a small, boring burg with wide streets to a large, boring, catatonic beige stucco hell megapolis. Please don't hold it against me. I was the middle (ignored) child among six siblings but managed to grow up and live a mostly productive life anyway. My childhood was obscenely normal, my adolescence was typically angsty. Married too young, had two amazing children, divorced young. Worked as a newspaper journalist for more than 25 years and managed to get out before all hell broke loose.

My exit strategy was a fellowship through the International Center for Journalists (thank you, Knight Foundation!) I spent 18 months teaching journalism in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Lima, Peru and traveled with my daughter for three months throughout Latin America. I returned to the Southwest in the summer of 2005 homeless, jobless but not quite broke. My parents had vacated my childhood home for the summer to escape the hellish heat and I settled in there to plan my next big adventure.

He appeared at a coffee shop, a bald guy with a silver goatee who managed to defrost my cynical heart with one great conversation. At our first meeting, he told me he'd been struggling to write a book and had a box full of materials to prove it. Would I look at them? See if there was a book there? I did and there was. We joined forces as business partners shortly thereafter, promptly fell in love and got married.

And yes, we wrote a book, together, without killing each other. It was published by Berrett-Koehler, Inc. in the summer of 2008.