Willem O'Reilly

I have always had a love for words. I grew up in a home where my father acted in Shakespeare's plays and my mother read us children's book classsics. My brothers and sisters and I (I am the oldest of 14) listened to opera on the radio and memorized all the songs on recordings of musicals like My Fair Lady, West Side Story, and Candide that had brilliant lyrics.

I acted in plays myself beginning at age 12. I studied mathematics in college (great for logical thinking) and theater in grad school (MA and PhD). I wrote my disseration on Ingmar Bergman as a theater director. Bergman made movies in the summer when the light was good in Sweden and directed plays inside in the long winters.

I taught theater and dramatic literature for ten years as a college professor. Then I became a fundraising writer creating grant proposals, direct mail, brochures, cartoon captions, newsletter articles, and thank you notes--a wide range of writing tasks that paid off later.

In all, I have spent half of my professional life as a professor and instructor at all levels of education. The other half has been writing.

I have written all kinds of content for online businesses of all kinds, from real estate to business consulting to education.

I love the creative flow of writing, as well as the technical details of revising and editing.