Meet Leasa

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.
~Leo Tolstoy

When I was a young freckle-faced girl I loved to lay with my head in my grandmother’s lap, inhaling the matronly scent of moth balls mingled with Chanel Number 5, listening eagerly as she animated the tales of Tom Sawyer or James Herriot for my young imagination. Her narrations eventually led to a deep love affair with books and stories of all kinds that led me into a world away from the troubled one I was growing up within.

I think my grandmother knew that by introducing me to characters who would take me by the hand and lead me peacefully away to another time and place, she could help me escape a fractured family life she had no power to remove me from, even if that escape was only a short moment of reprieve. A great attachment to the emotions of words and how they can permeate a reader’s life led me to childhood fantasies of growing up to be a writer, a dream that followed me into adulthood. Constant fervid scribbling in a well-worn Moleskine helped to ease a troubled childhood and an adolescence dripping in angst, but it took many years of wisdom and education to learn how to mold and shape those words into a meaningful and well-crafted story, a tale that connected emotionally with readers, opening up a direct river from my heart to theirs.

Professionally, I sit at a strange crossroads, an X-Y intersect of geek and writer. Concrete yet creative; a strange intersection, to say the least.  Like any creative person, I am intensely emotional, and I use that emotion to craft powerful, clear, and compelling stories. I am eccentrically observant, a quality that I feel aids in both storytelling and understanding an audience.

I am very much a geek, with an honours degree in computer science. Although my appearance belies my geekiness, I love gadgets, technology, geek humour and Star Wars. Like most technical people, I am a Type-A Perfectionist, but I recognize my illness and don’t expect others I work with to share it.

I am currently the Web Manager for Ledcor, where I am responsible for all of Ledcor’s web assets, from design decisions to development, to administration of web servers, content management systems, and content strategy. A perfect marriage of geek and writer! In the past I have managed and/or contributed to business development and communications for small and large organizations such as the Trucking Safety Council of BC, including design, web content strategy, writing, and social media marketing. I have written articles and stories for various publications and newspapers, both online and print.

On my personal side, I am a book nut, preferring classics literature to modern-day juvenile vampire trilogy. My favorite book is a toss-up between Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose prose is so eloquent it has made me cry in sadness for the lost art of classic wordsmiths. In fact, the latter contains my single favorite line in any book I’ve ever read, as it encapsulates something I think everyone in this life should remember:

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

For someone who has led a life with zero advantages, this quote is very profound. It has shaped my feelings as an adult, and helped me to remember from whence I came when I am inclined to judge someone who is pleading for the spare change that jingles loosely in my pocket. Everyone has a story, and not everyone has had advantages. Not everyone has the inner strength and resolution to claw their way out of disadvantage as I pride myself in having accomplished.