Editor’s Note — This is the third of 12 personal profile stories written by McClain High School journalism students about influential people in their lives.
“The act of writing is cathartic, healing. I love that writing is limitless.” — Angela Shepherd.
Angela Shepherd is a 1992 McClain High School graduate and Greenfield resident who writes no less than five stories per month for the Greenfield schools and local newspapers. She also recently began substitute teaching for the district. Shepherd says writing is something she’s been doing for as long as she can remember. When Shepherd was a child, she recalls walking down to the Greenfield Daily Times after school where her grandmother worked.
“The smell of ink would fill up your nose before you even walked in the front door,” she said.
She described her time spent there as a child as what originally sparked her interest in the newsroom, although that isn’t where her interest in journalism originally blossomed.
“While I was initially drawn for sentimental reasons, I knew that journalism was a very important part of life in a free society, and a very important part of the system of checks and balances between law enforcement and governments and the people they are sworn to serve,” the former Times-Gazette employee said.
As a kid, writing articles wasn’t something she saw herself pursuing once she got older. She says she thought she wanted to be a fighter pilot, then she was dead set on being a veterinarian.
“When I first went to college, that is what I was pursuing,” she said. “I quickly realized, however, that all that math was not my bag.”
Shepherd says she realized that being a veterinarian just simply wasn’t her thing. It was the second time she went to college that writing caught her attention.
“I think it really took me my second go at college, and someone calling to my attention that I loved to write and wasn’t half bad at it, for me to see it myself,” she said.
As of today, if she wasn’t interested in the art of writing, she said she’d find herself invested in another form of art, like painting or woodworking. “The sky is the limit!”
