Garnering
Polite applause
Fawning flattery
Self-serving criticism
Gush of passion
Nonchalance
Rejection
Acclaim.
Hoping to touch a shared place.
Praying to inspire.
Aspiring to reveal that no illusions exist.
Our world is as we see it.
Or becomes so.
Is what we make it.
To dream reality:
from hidden depths image and emotion emerge into awareness
and transform it.
Karla Kratz is a retired journalist, Tai Chi practitioner, and grandmother living in an 1875 stone house and narrow garden in the historic district of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
In Kratz’s forty-seven-year award-winning writing career she reported, wrote features, and edited for newspapers and radio; hosted a country music radio show; bought advertising media; and published a newsletter for her son’s first-grade class. She earned a journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
She has practiced the arts of Tai Chi and Qigong daily since 1994. For ten years she taught multiple Tai Chi and Qigong classes and workshops and presented demonstrations at many venues throughout Cumberland County, Pennsylvania.
Kratz has given a workshop on memoir writing at Carlisle (Pa.) Family YMCA, where she also taught nature journaling at a retreat.
As a reporter and feature writer for seventeen years at The Sentinel, the county-wide daily newspaper in Carlisle, Pa., Kratz wrote for every section of the newspaper from Front Page to Food to Sports to Business. She interviewed and developed in-depth features on hikers and caregivers on the Appalachian Trail, artists who shared their spiritual lives, alternative healers managing their sole proprietorships, and participants in World Wide Wrestling, among many other more diverse people.
Besides her numerous first- and second-place awards from regional journalism associations she also was voted best reporter by readers.
Kratz is entrenched in the historic district of Carlisle, Pennsylvania in a narrow 19th-century house and garden. Her daughter’s cat, Gatsby, and dog, Darien, who feature in her book, Idle Rambles, are buried in the garden. She continues to speculate on her place in nature in voluminous, so far unpublished, journals written in that garden.
Those who shaped me and my writing are many and varied.
My son, Andrew Garber-Browne, not only created this website. His gentle, persistent encouragement keeps me writing.
My daughter, Kelly Browne, has always pruned my ideas with her vision, beginning as a clear-eyed child, then as a brilliant-minded adult.
My late husband, Scott Browne, financed and indulged me for thirty-seven years as my career followed his from Missouri to Kansas to Oklahoma to Pennsylvania.
The journalism professors at the University of Missouri-Columbia indoctrinated me into the “old school” of the responsible, accurate, objective, Fourth Estate.
I suppose that definition has died. Google it. Hint: I’m not referring to the TV show.
I learned the requirements of a daily newspaper: fast ploughing through minutiae, consideration of the press room, and a gentle hand with brides-to-be posting their engagement photos at the Sedalia, Missouri Democrat. I’m thankful that how newspapers really work was shoved at me as a rookie women’s editor there.
At KMAM-KMOE-FM in little Butler, Missouri, the news editor/writer/reporter job I took was only part-time. I was given the opportunity to work full time and show off my extroverted side in a country music radio show each afternoon.
A job as traffic director at KAFG Radio in Oklahoma City introduced me to my astrology mentor, the smooth, clear-voiced DJ Lance Ferguson.
I got a look into the other side of the media — how creativity is bought and sold — as an advertising buyer and proposal writer for Ray Ackerman and Peggy Howard at an Oklahoma City advertising agency.
Then my aplomb and diplomacy was cultivated as a claims adjuster at a moving and storage company. Thank you Larry Howell.
Finally, editors at “The Sentinel” (Carlisle, Pennsylvania’s daily newspaper), helped me fall into my element — what I’d been trained to do many years ago in J-School.
The setup made for staying on task. Editors sat behind the reporters there — desks formed two concentric squares, reporters facing the walls, editors looking over their shoulders.
Questions were shouted across the newsroom. I was forced to learn to focus on my screen, my notes, my phone, a deadline.
Managing Editor Fred Burgess taught me to question the facts. Editor and columnist Rich Lewis imparted how to fly without all the facts. (He’d say, “If someone has a question, we’re putting out another paper tomorrow.”)
I learned how to sniff for a story from the late Kurt Wanfried; to make it fun from Francis Volpe; to get it done from Pam Saylor. The late Editor-in-Chief Carol Talley insisted that I write with my own voice -- and taught me when to keep silent.
Thank you all for an education far beyond the rudiments of my college years.
My biggest debt is to my parents, the late Allen Walters and Edith Godfrey Walters. Mother said, “Let’s write down ‘Journalism’,” when I was choosing my high school career track. Daddy always said, “You can be whatever you want to be,” kindly leaving out the details that you have to reaally want it, and you have to do what it takes to get there. They gave me life -- and showed me how to make my life what I want it to be.