I'm a New Yorker, born and raised on the upper west side of Manhattan. I like to tell this to people right from the get go because I think it explains a lot about me. My incessent use of sarcasm, my love of the arts, my yen for a decent bagel. I graduated from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU with a major in Theatre. My father worked in commercial real estate and suggested I get into the business to 'get a real job'. I took his advice and found that I really liked being able to pay my bills. I never did like the 'starving' part of the starving artist. As my real estate business grew acting and theatre took more and more of a back seat. Jeff and I moved to Portland in the summer of 2002 and I used this major life change to reconnect to my theatre roots and enjoyed some success in the local theatre scene, most notably acting in a couple of plays at The Artists Reperatory Theatre. I did also work in real estate capitalizing on the condo boom in Portland's thriving urban market. When I became  pregnant in 2006, Jeff and I had some long talk s about what kind of parents we wanted to be. We had been tossing around the idea of leaving our 9 to 5 jobs to start a writing room in town. We also had a larger vision to create an online art house style magazine centered around stellar writing that would be a dynamic resource for writers around the world. Jeff's brother had a space next door to his martial arts school and so the Writers' Dojo was born. Doesn't everybody leave their steady paying gigs and invest everthing into a new, arts based business with a 3 month old at home? Well, that's what we did and for all the risks, the benefits of this amazing creative collaboration have made it worth the challenge.  If you want to get involved or have any feedback please drop me a line anytime at rachel@writersdojo.org.