A B O U T    U S

Lane Browning was first paid for writing when she was a teenager (and who remembers that lame poem about clouds that won a prize in 5th grade?), earning bylines in the Bangkok World and the Sacramento Bee before completing a degree in Journalism. She has published hundreds of essays, investigative pieces, short stories, business articles, doggerel, humor, snarky letters, jokes, reviews and features in periodicals including The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The Oregonian, Portland Tribune, New Woman, OMNI, California Today, Cosmopolitan, Portland magazine, USAir, Rain City Review, Reader's Digest, and Black Lamb. 

She edited a huge book about the history of Packard engines (yes, really; the book weighs nearly as much as an engine) and several books about developmental disorders as well as articles for medical journals. She has worked as a reporter, sailing instructor, magazine editor, radio host assistant, and paralegal. She taught ESL to Royal Thai Navy officers in Bangkok at 16; she fell into a puffin burrow in Iceland in 2005 but sustained no injury (and harmed no puffin).

She is perhaps too fond of parentheticals and definitely too fond of ellipses. She is very UNfond of dangling modifiers and tautology.

Her Willamette Week column "Whiplash" was the paper's most popular feature and syndicated nationally; she judged WW's fiction contest.  She taught fiction classes for Oregon Writers Workshop and the Mountain Writers Center in Portland and judged the Kay Snow Writing Competition for Willamette Writers. She has read her work for events at Barnes and Noble, Broadway Books, Powell's Books, Proper Eats, Bold Sky Cafe, The Rose Schnitzer Home, Annie Bloom's Books, and smaller venues where the smell of coffee overpowers the scent of syllables. She has owned and operated three resume offices in California and two in Portland, mentoring more than two dozen employees.

She appeared on KATU's "AM Northwest" prattling about job hunting and resumes with Rebecca Webb and Steve Dunn. She would still have the video of that appearance, and the one on cable access, if her son hadn't (&!!*!!@@@#&?!) taped over them.

In 2006 she recorded the audiobook The Fabric of Autism, Weaving the Threads into a Cogent Theory, which was written by Judith Bluestone. She presented 2008 career/resume workshops at New Seasons and for NELA (for college applicants). In 2009 and 2010 she delivered five writing workshops for Multnomah County. 

This year she is helping author, publishing ninja and fisherman Ross Eliot revise/edit his book Babette: The Many Lives, Two Deaths and Double Kidnapping of Dr. Ellsworth," which is expected to hit print in 2012.

In addition to writing instruction, she offers life coaching, advocacy and research for individuals in transition or undergoing trauma. She is a compulsive resource and catalyst. She knows the lyrics to far too many songs. Rain is, to her, the most wonderful of all things, and she is happy to rhapsodize on the topic when time permits. 

But don't ask her to explain Fermat's last theorem, monoclonal antibodies, supply side economics, or the befuddling popularity of "Dancing with the Stars."