Welcome to who’s on fourth where one member of the yeah write community will interview another yeah writer, and the interview will publish the fourth Monday of each month. Next in the series features Arden of Arden Ruth Writes interviewing The Silver Leaf Journal.

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yeah write on yeah write: Arden interviews Silverleaf

Last January, Silverleaf clicked on a badge at the end of a blog post and nothing was ever the same. At the time, she suffered from a touch of writer’s block and knew she could use some inspiration. When she stumbled upon yeah write, Silverleaf found herself at the speakeasy (for any of you newbies, that’s our fiction|poetry challenge that recently moved back home to yeah write). She immediately felt inspired and submitted her first entry to yeah write that same week.

At first, the prompts were what kept bringing her back here week after week. However, once she got to know some of her fellow yeah writers, she realized the community was actually what drove her to return:

You can usually find Silverleaf at the fiction|poetry challenge but lately she’s been trying her hand at the micro challenge as well. Some folks just can’t stay away from our ultimate question!

For our lurkers and virgins out there who may be thinking of diving into our writing challenge pool, she has some spot-on advice for you:

Silverleaf lives and writes in Ottawa but grew up in downtown Toronto. Growing up, she knew she wanted three things:

1. to be an artist;
2. to be a mother; and
3. to live in Ireland.

She believes she was around twelve years old when she discovered creative writing. From that point on, she knew what she wanted to do with her life. When she discovered Jim Morrison in the tenth grade, she really dove into poetry and worked her way through his reading list. After graduation, she lived out one of my dreams and took off to Ireland to write. However, things didn’t exactly go as planned.

Silverleaf has simple, yet important, goals for her blog and her writing:

When she isn’t typing away, you can find her doing any number of activities. She loves to travel and has been lucky enough to take a few trips over the past years. She’s been everywhere from Cape Town, South Africa to a quiet beach in Maine. She is especially fond of New York City where she has visited twice.

To get out from behind her desk, she runs. Well, sometimes she runs.

On top of all that, Silverleaf loves baking, cooking and photography, but she has a special love for reading. She will spend hours reading up on genealogy and history (Have you met Nate?). She also enjoys historical fiction, classical literature and stories with an anthropological angle or that explore complex human relationships.

Thank you Silverleaf for letting us dive into your life a little further here at yeah write. We are so happy to have you in our community! If you all want to know more about her, here are five more things you never knew about Silverleaf:

1. Aside from English and Celtic Studies, she has studied a random list of things from the Jain religion to Turing.
2. She’s a really good shot with a .22.
3. Twice she has negotiated at the United Nations on behalf of Canada.
4. Aside from what she said earlier about childhood ambitions, she did very briefly want to be a ventriloquist.
5. Biltong – a special kind of air-cured beef from South Africa – is one of her favorite foods. She makes it at home by cutting up rump steak and hanging it to dry on low in a dehydrator for a few days. In South Africa, her husband used to hang it in the stairwell!

[hr] Are you ready for the yeah write #185 weekly writing challenges opening this week? We hope so! Your badges await in the sidebar. Grab the code, paste into the text or HTML view of your post, then submit your post to the moderated grid for a little friendly competition. We’re glad you’re here.