FIRESIDE CHAT DECEMBER & TV SHOW 02.03.14 : MAINTAINING AND SUSTAINING HEALTHY MARRIAGES Lesley Foster is the owner of Ink & Inquiry, a workshop-based business that fosters personal, professional and creative growth through written inquiry. Her innovative workshops offer fresh insights on tapping our innate creative intelligence to: reduce stress, problem-solve, innovate and adapt to life’s on-going challenges and opportunities.
Lesley’s love of writing began as a teenager writing in a journal, a practice she maintains today. After graduating from UVA, she embarked on a career in communications in Washington, D.C., later moving to Portland, Oregon. Her background includes: Director of Publications & Research for a national trade association; owner of a writing business, Foster Communications; editor of NW Design & Living magazine; and Marketing Communications Director for an Oregon firm specializing in hospital construction.
In 2000, Lesley returned to Charlottesville with her husband to raise a family. Summing up the years since then, she writes:
The next ten years was a mixed bag of stay-at home mothering, freelancing, a stint in the mortgage business, and several years in real estate. That was my decade of reinvention, a time filled with change, questions and surrendering to the unknown. Those years proved the perfect segue to 2010, when (at age 50) I found myself wondering how to write the next chapter of my life. As usual, I planted my questions on paper. Page by page I wended my way to inspiration and a decision to teach journal writing as a tool for healing. In 2010, I taught my first workshop at The Women’s Initiative, a local non-profit counseling center. From that workshop sprang new workshops, a monthly journal group, a women’s wisdom group, and Ink & Inquiry.
Today, Lesley conducts regular workshops at Luminous Enterprises Conference Studio in downtown Charlottesville and is developing a series of on-line offerings. She has taught writing workshops at Martha Jefferson Hospital and St. Anne’s-Belfield School, and leads a weekly writing group, Coffee & Ink on Thursday mornings at C’ville Coffee. Active in the Vinegar Hills Toastmasters Club, Lesley has won several area speaking competitions, and has taught public speaking seminars at the Center for Non-Profit Excellence (CNE) and UVA’s Office of Postdoctoral Affairs.