I’m honored to be a committee member of the Midwest Writers’ Workshop. The annual conference celebrated its 40th year last month. That’s 40 years of volunteers working to put on a conference for one reason: they love to help writers.
The workshop, located in my hometown of Muncie, is where I met Caren (Johnson) Estesen who sold WEARING to Wiley. It’s where it all began for me, so I love the chance to give back to it and the awesome group of writers who attend each year. Many of them are like family now.
When folks ask me about how to get into writing, my second tip after the obvious and often forgotten first tip (WRITE!) is to attend a conference.
Matt Shouse put together…
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Stephen Terrell is the author of Stars Fall, a lawyer, and one of the many writing friends I’ve made through the years at the Midwest Writers Workshop. He’s also a the host of JUST US at Indiana Talks.
I recently joined Stephen to talk about how my label chasing adventures began and my new book EATING.
Listen to the Podcast (My interview starts at around 24:30)…
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Kimberly Palmer, author of Generation Earn, recently interviewed me about our crazy, global food system over at U.S. News & World Report.
Look folks, when it comes to food, ignorance isn’t bliss, sometimes it means you’re supporting slavery or consuming deadly chemicals.
Read the interview: Surprising Facts Where Food Comes From…
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This week I appeared on HuffPo Live alongside Dr. Mara Einstein, author of Compassion Inc, and Wendell Potter, a former health insurance executive who spoke out against the industry’s deception of the American public and author of Deadly Spin.
I talked about Starbucks C.A.F.E. Practices program that I witnessed (or in many cases did not witness) in Colombia while researching EATING. And I also talked about TOMS. My main point was that we are just served up a pill of “do gooding” and we swallow it whole without asking questions about who or how much such ideas benefit the people they are meant to serve.
Dr. Einstein shared a mind blowing example. McDonald’s had a campaign playing up the fact that a portion of all…
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The line between exploitation and opportunity in our global economy is blurry.
This blurred line is at the heart of my recent cover story in the CS Monitor. I feel that the feature is one of my most important works to date, bridging my travels and research from my first book WEARING and my latest book EATING.
I felt compelled to write the main story as I followed the tragedy of the recent collapsed factory in Bangladesh that killed 1,129 garment workers.
Here’s how Monitor Editor, John Yemma, introduced the feature:
“Kelsey’s reporting is not designed to steer you away from these items but to help you appreciate the human lives behind them.”
Read the main story, “Follow the…
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The soft face of the child ducks for cover as a tank fires and missiles launch. You can almost see the innocence leaving his eyes for good and fear taking its place. Awful.
But this is happening and this is always happening somewhere in the world.
Watch this five minute video and think of what it must be like to grab all that’s important and keep walking until the fear of death is far behind.
…
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The last writing award I won was in 4th grade. I wrote a story about a boy who stumbled upon a pair of flying shoes that he wore, flew into the heavens, and met Thor. It won honorable mention in the county writing competition.
My first two books have been well-received, and launched my career as a writer, but they’ve yet to win me any awards. Sure, if the publishing world had a superlative category, I would definitely have a good shot at, “Most likely to go anywhere, in search of anything.” But no actual awards, yet.
That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that I’m an Emerging Author Finalist for the 2013 Eugene & Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, alongside Tricia…
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Paying Cash for Kids
“Hi, my name is Kelsey Timmerman. How much does it cost to have a kid at your hospital? I’ll pay cash. ”
This is the state of the American medical system today. Patients are forced to approach the birth of a child like they would shopping for a used car. That’s exactly how it felt, and that’s exactly how an expecting mother described her similar experience shopping for hospitals recently to the New York Times:
“I feel like I’m in a used-car lot.”
Like the woman featured in the story, we had insurance, just not insurance that covered maternity expenses. Of course, we didn’t realize that we didn’t have maternity coverage until after my wife Annie was pregnant with our second child.
We had different insurance for the birth…
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Summer is a time of rest, bike rides, backyard pools, and teaching my 4-year-old daughter to rider her bike without training wheels (on Father’s Day! I won Father’s day!). But I love summer events. They tend to be more intimate and laid back.
Here are my July Appearances
July 20 – Paso Robels, CA: Project Hope & Fairness Fundraiser at Pear Valley Vineyards. Wine and chocolate? Yes please! I traveled with Tom Neuhaus of Project Hope and Fairness in Ivory Coast while researching WHERE AM I EATING? Happy to help them raise money to improve the lives of cocoa farmers in West Africa.
July 22 – Columbus, IN: Batholomew County Library. Love visting libraries and happy they are having me back to talk about EATING after I spoke there about…
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Shortly after I landed in Valledupar, Colombia, I was abducted by the indigenous Arhuaco.
Over the previous few week I had been in contact with them and must’ve asked, “Do I need a translator? My Spanish stinks,” ten times. They never answered. They never told me if they were going to pick me up at the airport. They never told me that I was going to be whisked away into the mountains down treacherous roads to the heart of their spiritual world. They never told me that I was about to have an amazing experience witnessing the most preserved indigenous culture I had ever seen.
Of course, I did use Google Translate for all of my emails, so maybe they thought my Spanish was better than it actually is.
Lucky for me,…
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