Writing is the foundation for everything that Christine Halvorson has achieved in life.
It’s led her to jobs, starting her own business, uncovering family history – and even her greatest love.
Halvorson grew up in the Twin Cities of Minnesota and never had any intention of leaving. That is until she met her husband Ken Sheldon on a one week writers program in Maine.
It was the summer of 1996 and she was a few years into a commitment she made to herself to foster her creative writing. She had taken trips the previous two summers to exclusive programs in Northern Minnesota and Washington state, where she had to apply for entry.
“It was basically summer camp for writers,” she said. “Like MacDowell Colony, only for women.”
She saw an ad in Poets & Writers Magazine, applied and got accepted. Up until this point, Halvorson had never stepped foot in New England, but it wasn’t about the location, more about the opportunity.
“In my heart I said I want to be a writer,” Halvorson said.
It was a small program, with just 10 writers and two instructors. There was free writing in the morning, classes in the afternoon and then time to socialize in the evening. One night, Sheldon pulled out his guitar and played songs relevant to each person. He strummed a Bob Dylan song for Halvorson, showing he noticed the Minnesota roots between the two.
“I fell in love immediately,” Halvorson. “And he didn’t have a clue.”
But what was a couple of writers supposed to do living half a country apart after only knowing each other a week? Begin communicating through email of course.
Now at this time, email was not a thing that everyone had. But through her job at the Minnesota Legislature and Sheldon’s job at Byte Magazine, both had the ability to send notes back and forth without the use of the United State Postal Service.
“The email becomes an important factor in the romance,” Halvorson said. “What a great way for two writers to court, date each other.”
Later that summer she was invited to Jaffrey for a visit. She got to check out the region and see Sheldon perform in “The Matchmaker.” It was essentially a week-long first date and as Halvorson puts it “the rest is history.”
They made a commitment to be in each other’s state ever other month aided by cheap round-trip tickets from Minnesota to Boston, and by the following summer she had taken a leave of absence from her job to come to New Hampshire, spending her days caring for horses of Sheldon’s friends in Dublin. She then got a part time job at the Old Farmer’s Almanac as the publication’s first web editor.
She had sold her house in St. Paul prior to the summer and by the end, she decided it was time they lived in the same place. In addition to her part time job at the Old Farmer’s Almanac, she worked six hours a week as an arts reporter at the Monadnock Ledger.
“It was a great way to get to know the community as a newcomer,” Halvorson said. “And I spent a lot of time lost on the backroads of the Monadnock region. This was before GPS of course.”
By Christmas, Sheldon had proposed and they were married in March of 1998.
Now at the time Halvorson didn’t know it, but those two part time jobs were the beginning of something big.
“The foundation of my life is writing and it has led me to many interesting things, including my husband,” she said.
She spent some time freelancing, as did Sheldon, collaborating on projects that let’s just say left a lot to be desired from a creativity standpoint. They wrote about natural cleaning products, reducing clutter, Ben Franklin and all the helpful ways to use baking soda.
“These are what writers write for pay when they can’t do their creative writing for pay,” Halvorson said.
In 2004, she saw a job posting for a writer at Stonyfield Organic. But she quickly realized this wasn’t a typical writing job. Stonyfield CEO Gary Hirshberg had become fascinated with the idea of blogging thanks to the presidential campaign of Howard Dean. So Halvorson was in charge of five blogs, four of which she wrote – and no, they weren’t just about yogurt.
“I was sort of a roving reporter in the facility,” Halvorson said, writing about children’s nutrition, women’s health, environmental issues and a behind-the-scenes look at the operation.
She did that for two years, but then at the advice of a friend, Halvorson took the leap and started her own corporate blogging consulting business.
“This blogging thing was turning into a big thing in the world,” she said.
At that point in 2006, it was all blogging and nothing could slow down the momentum it had created. It was the future of web presence for businesses – until Facebook and Twitter were introduced.
Since she was so knowledgeable about blogging, clients and prospective clients assumed she knew about the new online platforms that were sweeping the world. The only thing was that she didn’t.
So Halvorson decided to do the only thing she felt would help her stay ahead of the curve and continue to grow her business. She locked herself in a hotel room for three days and taught herself everything she needed to know – at least for the time being.
“I read everything I could find,” she said.
She went on to teach social media at Southern New Hampshire University and UNH Manchester as an adjunct professor and continues to work with clients for social media needs, including running Monadnock Community Hospital’s Twitter feed.
The biggest need for her expertise comes in the form of business owners over the age of 50.
“People under 40 usually know how to use Facebook for business,” Halvorson said. “But for those others, my job is to talk them off the ledge.”
Halvorson can’t complain one minute about the fact she’s been a work at home small business owner for almost a decade and a half. She can go for walks when she wants or head out to Parker & Sons Coffee Roasting for a cup of their Sumatra, a dark roast that sits atop the list as her favorite cup right now.
“I like to say it gives hope to English majors everywhere,” Halvorson said.
But Halvorson worked hard to get to the point of being her own boss, and it all came about from writing. As a young 22 year old, she worked for a weekly newspaper north of the Twin Cities, putting in 60 hours a week and “getting paid a negative amount of money” covering the county. It was there, she worked murder trials and uncovered a corrupt sheriff that “some day there will be a book about.”
“It was great experience. I did learn an awful lot,” Halvorson said. “And it made my life quite interesting for a year and a half.”
After two years, she had her fill of the newspaper world and worked a couple of jobs, one as editor of Sunday school materials for the National Publishing House of the Lutheran Church and the others as a public relations contact for Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota.
It was there where she worked on her first computer, which she swears weighed 60 pounds, and put out an employee newsletter. She still remembers the excitement of being able to bold a headline for the first time.
It was a combination of her writing experience, knowledge of government and most importantly, slight introduction to desktop publishing that helped her land the job as assistant director of the Legislative Commission on the Economic Status of Women.
She worked with the 10-person elected commission, essentially as a lobbyist on the inside. After a month, she remembers telling herself it wasn’t for her. Then Halvorson proceeded to serve 10 years in the position, working on a number of legislative pieces that she can still see the impact of today, like universal healthcare and childcare funding.
“Important stuff for an important population – women,” she said. “We had some success and those successes fueled my interest year after year.”
That is where she was still working when she met Sheldon. And it’s a good thing because she likely wouldn’t have had email to help foster the relationship from afar.
“Email was invented when I was there,” she said. “And state government was one of the first to get it.”
She had access to the offices at night and would often go in to correspond.
“Not a lot of legislative work happening,” Halvorson said.
It’s also where she first worked with a laptop, an IBM Think Pad that cost $5,000 and was shared between 12 people.
So you can see how all her different jobs and experiences set Halvorson up for creating Halvorson New Media, where she helps with social media assessment, as well as writing and content creation. She hosts workshops and webinars meant to teach the necessary tricks to master social media marketing.
But she still enjoys her own creative writing. In the fall of 2018, she published “Inmate”, a story that is loosely based on her family history. She spent nearly a decade researching her family, but found roadblocks along the way like the reason why her grandmother ended up in a girls home. So instead of pressing forward to find every last detail, Halvorson created a novel that is mixture of truth and fiction.
“It shows you can turn your family research into a story, whether it’s true or not,” she said. She currently has a prequel to “Inmate” in the works.
She has two adult stepdaughters from a previous marriage who live in Minnesota and between them have three girls, all of who are a big part of her life.
Since moving to New Hampshire, Halvorson has lived in Dublin, Jaffrey, Hancock and now Peterborough, having moved next to downtown for an urban center.
When people ask her what brought her to New Hampshire, Halvorson will usually say “I came here for the tropical winters.” But the way she sees it now, it was a series of well connected steps that led to how her life has unfolded, she just didn’t know it at the time.
“It all makes sense now,” Halvorson said.