Amber Kay Ferguson

Amber Kay: Conservative columnist, Christian editor and web designer

If you are a survivor of abuse or, God forbid!, still a victim
please click here.

WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?

I've been winning writing contests since high school, when I snagged the Texas High School Press Association's General Column Writing competition two consecutive years (a record) along with numerous awards for UIL editorials and Ready Writing.

I dived into a freelance career as a graphic artist, and racked up a portfolio ranging from basic business cards to newsletters to full color magazines. That's concept to completion, including the mags ... I'm the proverbial lone wolf. I also design original (no template!) Web sites and e-newsletters, and can assist with search engine optimization.

I returned to writing in 2001, capturing first place in Hollywood's "Mona Schreiber Prize for Humorous Fiction & Non-Fiction," and discovered writing is an incurable malady. I have since placed in several other contests, including Faith in Fiction's Christmas competition and Long Story Short's Essay contest. My most recent win was the 2007 "Talk Like a Pirate" competition, sponsored by Harvest House Publishing. I served as a judge in the 2003 Tulsa Fellowship of Christian Writer humorous writing contest, and also judged the 2005 Abilene Writers Guild personal essay competition. My most recent book is Humor for a Teacher's Heart, an anthology. Actually, that's my only book. I admit my bio sounded better before that last sentence, but that honesty thing can be a cruel master sometimes.

Among other print and Internet credits, I've written articles for the Christian PEN: Proofreaders and Editors Network. I recently quit a freelance gig writing humor and feature columns for The Huntsville Item, the newspaper at the heart of America's Death Row. One of the reasons I left was because the bosses forbade me to write about the death penalty. They said it was too controversial. Go figure.

Humor is my first love. But I'm passionate about feature stories in which people let me inside long enough to get a glimpse at why they do what they do. For example: I don't want to know what an Elvis impersonator does, but why would one choose to impersonate Elvis? What mental or emotional payback does one get from that? On the flipside, I used to write morbid personal essays, and consistently achieved better than a 90 percent acceptance rate in that genre´. But I gave up that nasty habit. After I won a contest for a particularly morbid essay, I received fan mail about my story ... if fan mail qualifies as readers saying one has made them sob. I compared it to mail I received regarding an unrelated humorous essay, about which readers said that I'd made them laugh. It was a turning point.

If I have any ability to touch people through my work, I want to make them think, make them feel, make them laugh ... even make them curse me (for my brilliant ideas, of course). But I'll never again intentionally burden my readers with tears.