"A Nurse and a Writer Walk Into a Bar in Montana..."

This year, we’ll be sharing a weekly column by Karla Theilen, our Neighborhood Storyteller. These stories will show what it means to live a life of intention, one where our small and ordinary, everyday actions contribute to building stronger communities.

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Strong Towns Neighborhood Storyteller, Karla Theilen, replacing the message in her typewriter mailbox. (Source: Author.)

Since this is my first day on the job as your Neighborhood Storyteller, I think it’s only fair to provide you with a little personal information. For instance, if I were you, I’d want to know how a nurse, who is also a writer living in Montana, landed a job writing a weekly column for Strong Towns. I’d want to know a little bit of her backstory, too, so I’d have reason to believe she’s someone whose stories I’d actually want to read every week for a whole year. If I were you, I’d also want to know if the Montana nurse/writer could tell a good joke. Let’s see here… A nurse and a writer walk into a bar in Montana… This is where you, dear reader, get to be creative. It’s like the contest in the New Yorker where you get to try your hand at writing a caption for a blank cartoon. Everybody loves audience participation.

When I read the original job posting for this column on the Strong Towns website, it was listed as “Lifestyle Columnist.” I had to say the words out loud. Lifestyle Columnist. I wasn’t exactly sure I knew what that meant, but the job description, which I read in no less than ten times, spoke to me directly, especially the part that said, “This isn’t academic or technical writing. It’s about getting up close with your neighborhood and sharing that journey with a national audience.“

I found out about the Lifestyle Columnist job opening through my sister, Christa, who happens to be the office assistant at Strong Towns. She mentioned it to me casually, the day before the application deadline. I was interested, but reluctant. She reminded me that Strong Towns’ hiring process keeps applicants’ identities anonymous, so no one would know I was her sister. (We’re Minnesotans, born and raised. We can’t help but worry about things like being accused of favoritism.) I threw a Hail Mary, and by some grace, or intervention by the Fates, I got the gig. 

Missoula, Montana. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

Here’s where I’ll pause while you look up Missoula, Montana, to get an idea of where I currently live before I give you a little backstory. Got it? Okay.

Back in 1981 when I was eight years old, I made the mistake of telling my father that I was going to be a writer when I grew up. It seemed a reasonable aspiration at the time. No one had ever told me that ordinary people from Brainerd, Minnesota, couldn’t become writers, but judging by my father’s reaction, that seemed to be the case. I might as well have told him I wanted to be a leprechaun when I grew up, or a unicorn. 

Later in life as an unmoored college freshman, I took a career aptitude test that told me I was best suited for a job as an Emergency Room Nurse. My academic advisor, keen to my capricious attention span, shook his head and said, “You’ll never make it through the nursing program.” My mother offered encouragement by telling me that any ordinary person could become a nurse, and reminded me that I was creative, that I was a good writer. 

I interpreted these mixed messages from adults in my life as permission to drop out of college, and spent the next ten years as a farmhand, bartender, receptionist, pet sitter, ranch hand, fence builder, housekeeper, trail builder, river guide, and mule skinner, to name a few. In 2002, I landed a coveted job on a fire lookout tower in the middle of Idaho, where over the course of six summers, I filled 36 notebooks with mountaintop observations, and the backlog of stories from the previous ten years. Eventually, I came down from the mountain with those notebooks and went back to school, earning my Bachelors in Nursing in 2009. I am making this all sound much easier, and perhaps more interesting, than it actually was, but I’m a storyteller after all. That’s what I was hired to do.

But back to the present tense, and the Lifestyle Columnist job. After some jumping up and down, giddy with excitement over my first real writing job, the sparkle began to fade, and I felt certain a mistake had been made. Lifestyle Columnist? What kind of lifestyle was I supposed to write about? What style was my life, anyway? I must have missed something. They must have missed something. I frantically read through my application materials to decipher how I had misrepresented myself. I mean, do these people know I am not on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook? Do they realize I’m too old for TikTok? Does it matter that my lifestyle does not include Alexa, eyelash extensions, or even cable television, and despite all my best efforts, I still don’t understand Bitcoin?

I pulled out of my tailspin a few days later when, on a Zoom call with the fabulous Strong Towns team, I was informed that the job title had been revised from “Lifestyle Columnist” to “Neighborhood Storyteller.” Hallelujah. The lights came back on, and I could breathe again. A Neighborhood Storyteller was something I could see myself as, something I could get my hands around. Neighborhoods are something I understand. If I count up every place I’ve called home in the last three decades, I’ve had more addresses than birthdays. As for storytelling? Remember the 36 notebooks? More than almost anything else in life, I absolutely love to tell stories. And this year, I can’t wait to tell them to you.

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