Ardyce C. Whalen

BIO

Ardyce Whalen earned two bachelor’s degrees (education and fine arts), and a master’s degree in communication at the University of North Dakota. She taught Language Arts at the junior high, senior high, and college level. She has had non-fiction published in “Central States Speech Journal,” “Gifted, Creative, Talented” (magazine), and feature articles in a local newspaper, “The Town Crier.” She and her husband retired in Tucson, where she won second place in the East Campus 2011 Writing Competition, personal Narrative category. Retirement has meant golfing for her husband and time for Ardyce to read, write, paint, and seek a truth that made sense to her.

Finding her truth was never easy, not even during her growing-up years on an isolated farm in Minnesota. The vivid memory, when she was eight years old, of being severely scolded by the pastor of their family church for wearing fingernail polish. He told her that only bad girls painted their nails, and did she want to be a bad girl? The thought of the encounter is still painful. It made her think and set her on a truth-finding path that still occupies her mind and spirit.