Return Home

Writer Relishes Life of Contradictions
By Michael Abrams

Author Bio

Admit it. Secretly, like me, you spend plenty of mental energy denying even a splinter of contradiction in your personality. There is something to be said for keeping evidence of internal dissent internal. But let's also admit this is the boring way of signaling you are a person on whom others can count.

Now meet Valerie Lipow, who, I believe, has found a better way. Valerie is a San Diego-based technical writer and a nationally certified career counselor.

Valerie has a powerhouse personality. One of her secrets: rather than fretting over her contradictions, she's proud of them. Valerie told me with mischievous relish how she once placed a personal ad in an alternative newspaper, headlining it "Full of Contradictions."

The most pertinent contradiction within Valerie seems to be the coexistence of equally developed creative and pragmatic sides.

"I have been writing since elementary school," Valerie says, adding that she received her first rejection notice at age 11 (for an illustrated children's book called "Hubert the Happy Heffelump.") Today, she writes freelance articles for trade magazines and occasionally writes short stories.

The practical also sits comfortably on Valerie. While many of us bitten with the writing bug indulged our fantasies through college, she sized up the pitfalls of majoring in something like English, Journalism, or Spanish Literature. "I wasn't going to starve in a garret, and I didn't want to teach English to classes full of bored teenagers," she says.

So Valerie, a Los Angeles native and University of California-Irvine graduate, earned a Master's degree in vocational rehabilitation counseling from the University of Arizona. Born with limited use of her right hand, leg, and arm, Valerie never let this prevent her from pursuing her goals.

Career counseling was a way for her to help other people pursue theirs. Valerie co-founded and served as first president of the Arizona Career Development Association. While working at Glendale Community College near Phoenix, Valerie also pioneered the use of computer-assisted tools for career exploration and decision-making.

More evidence of Valerie's success in the guidance field abounds on the Web and in numerous articles on career planning and professions—from plastic surgery to animal behaviorism. For nearly two years, she wrote weekly articles on retailing careers for Monster.com, and hosted a weekly careers chat on that site.

From 1983 to 1998, Valerie gained experience in technical communication, developing corporate training materials and college curricula in Arizona and in Grand Junction, Colorado. In 1998, while writing Retailing Career Starter, a career planning book published by LearningExpress, IT consulting firm Compuware Corporation recruited her to write software documentation.

In Milwaukee, Valerie developed inventory and maintenance tracking software, Help, and training guides for the Miller Brewing Company. Then in 2000, her husband, Dale, was offered a great job in San Diego. Today they live in Carlsbad, with their son, daughter, two dogs, and a cat.

Though she came to San Diego unemployed, Valerie was unfazed. "I'm very good at finding work," she says. She contacted the San Diego STC chapter, did some projects for Technical Standards, and now works for Accelrys, Inc., in life science information design.

One last detail. That personal ad Valerie wrote in 1983 turned out to be one of the most consequential pieces she has ever authored: it resulted in a date with Dale. Valerie's life proves it can't hurt to be full of contradictions.