Home of The Library Writer

The Library Writer, aka Heather Renee, is either a writer who farms, or a farmer who writes. It really depends on the day. 

Heather has a B.A. in English and an M.B.A. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which was a bit more relevant when she was an award-winning communications director in Alaska. 

Heather's first job as a 5th-grade teacher began a chapter filled with characters from pre-K through college. She penned many pages of adventures in education, from teaching immersive English as a Second Language to creating innovative kindergarten readiness programs for low-income children. In the end, she wrote herself into a senior leadership position at a large school district, where she managed media relations, grant writing, crisis communications, program evaluation, a website with nearly five million annual views, multiple social media channels, and an in-house publishing facility.

Craving a dramatic plot twist, Heather fled the icy grip of the subarctic for the much warmer shores of Lake Michigan. There she started a small farm with her husband and two youngest kids, and finally began writing about the characters who’d taken up residence in her head. Through her consulting firm, Raven House Enterprises, Heather still helps nonprofits and small businesses with grants, program evaluation, and comprehensive communication strategies (but only for a handful of clients, because her novel’s characters start to yell at her if she ignores them for too long).

Today, Heather’s writing is supervised by a dozen Scottish Highland cows, a blue-eyed goose who rules ‘her’ ducks with an iron wing, a rotating cast of theatrical pasture pigs, an army of sassy barn cats, and an unreasonably large flock of free-range chickens who can only be justified as “cheaper than therapy.” She’s finally finished a novel, something she’d been dreaming about since she started her first one at the age of 11 (and then got distracted for the next thirty or so years. Thanks, ADHD!)

Heather’s debut novel, Vera’s Vertigo, is undergoing its last round of revisions. Not because she’s a perfectionist, but because querying is terrifying. With the encouragement of her beta readers and therapy chickens, Heather has bravely committed to start querying this summer. She’s hoping for her very own meet-cute with a collaborative agent who loves character-driven contemporary fiction featuring mid-life reinventions. 

In the meantime, you can read the first chapter of Vera’s Vertigo here.