Katie Frances

My professional life began with a diploma in film production, a dream to one day tell stories, and a move across Canada to stunning British Columbia. The better part of my twenties was spent traveling, learning, exploring, growing, and adjusting to the realization that focusing on my screenwriting career was not the most effective way to pay rent. I reflected, refocused, spent roughly 2 more years basking in West Coast beauty, then decided it was time to begin living like a grown up.

When I went back to school, it was not with the intention to leave my story-telling hopes behind me, but rather to study the story-telling techniques of others, to read the most famous stories and to learn something about how they came to be. Obtaining my degree in English Language and Literature was inspiring, rewarding, and fantastic practice for my next scholarly adventure in a teacher education program.

My decision to become an educator was a very adult one; it symbolized both an end to much of the spontaneity and adventure to which I was accustomed, as well as the beginning of a comfortable and stable future. My teaching career has brought, and continues to bring me a variety of adult luxuries and adult pressures. Teaching forces me to focus, to organize, to confront, to assess, and to adapt to situations that my 20 year old self would never have imagined experiencing; at the same time, however, it allows me to think like a child again, to be creative and fun. Perhaps most importantly, it keeps stories in my life. Whether I am reading them, teaching about them, or telling them, they still surround me.

Today, I am a home-owner, wife to be, aunt, dog mom, and professional educator. I am deeply rooted in adult culture but I remain as in love as ever with the beauty and inspiration that comes from a good story. Hence, my online mission: to share and collect real, powerful, motivational stories of 21st century adulthood and its joys. There are a seemingly endless amount of negative points that can be made about being a grown-up in the modern Western World...I am seeking out the opposite. I live for stories of followed dreams, of epiphanies, awakenings, and joyous realizations that strike at unlikely times and places.