About the author — Colleen Newvine Tebeau

I grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, a blue-collar General Motors town about an hour and a half north of Detroit.

I took newspaper class in high school and it changed my life. I majored in journalism at Central Michigan University, where I worked on the college newspaper for all four years. In fact, I got my first assignment at CM LIFE before I’d been to my first class. I worked as a reporter and editor at daily, weekly and monthly publications before I got a little restless.

I started my MBA in Michigan’s part-time program and took a marketing job at a technology consulting firm to learn more about the Internet. The tech market tanked, and I moved into public relations at Michigan, learning about press release distribution, media pitching and media training by day, and market research, corporate strategy and leadership at night.

After graduation, I combined my journalism experience and my business education by going to work for a major news organization. After about five years in marketing roles there, I became a part-time product manager, spending the other part of my time launching a marketing consulting firm, also called Newvine Growing.

I am a self-made social media geek, having been blogging for several years now and enthusiastically adding Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla and whatever’s next to the mix.

I have lived in New York for five years with my husband, John. I continue to write freelance feature articles to scratch the writing itch.

Why a blog about reinvention?

My artist husband, John Tebeau, made this painting as a vision of how I want my life to be.

I appreciate living life intentionally, paying attention to what I want and need most out of life. I launched this blog in 2009 in a sort of mid-life crisis, wanting an outlet to ask questions about what makes life meaningful and to profile people who inspire me.

In the two years that followed, I paid attention to what kinds of stories got me most excited: creativity, career and food and drink. In 2011, I am focusing more on those three areas.

It’s not as though these topics are new to me.

I was on my elementary school newspaper staff and hung out with the band and theater kids in high school. I’ve been drawn to creatives as long as I can remember, including managing an alt-rock band in my 20s and marrying an artist.

I took the Dale Carnegie course in my early 20s and saw how attention to leadership and goals could lead to dramatic change. I’m a student of Keith Ferrazzi’s Relationship Masters Academy for the same reason. One of the greatest benefits of my MBA was spending untold hours in the company of smart classmates intent on doing more with their careers and lives.

While I grew up eating a typically 1970s Midwestern diet of processed food, one of my favorite childhood memories is of my grandfather’s huge garden, where he gave me a raspberry bush that was mine to tend. In college I took a nutrition class that jolted me with an awareness of how much salt and how little fiber I was consuming, so I set out to improve my eating habits, including cutting out meat and learning how to cook with actual fresh produce.

But this blog isn’t just about me. It’s about the conversation. I love passing along wisdom that others share in interviews and blog posts, and I love when you stop by and offer your thoughts in comments.

Contact me

I welcome your participation in the conversation so please leave comments wherever you feel the inspiration.

But if you prefer, you can also contact me via Twitter — @cnewvine – or via email: cnewvine at gmail dot com.

You can also find me on:

• LinkedIn — my professional history
• @NewvineGrowing on Twitter — my Twitter account focusing on food, farming, farmers markets and marketing
• NewvineGrowing paper.li — a daily round up of Twitter content, automatically curated by paper.li based on Twitter accounts I follow from @NewvineGrowing