Scrapbooker shares her story in ‘Chicken Soup’
Maggie Koller says weddings and babies aren’t the only things that fill up the pages of a scrapbook.
By Erik Gable
Maggie Koller was teaching a class in scrapbooking about three years ago when a woman asked her why, as a single woman with no children, she even bothered.
“Why in the world do you scrapbook?” Koller recalls the woman saying. “It doesn’t seem like you have much material without a family.”
That incident formed the basis of a story Koller wrote titled “The Single Scrapper,” which appears in the recently published book “Chicken Soup for the Scrapbooker’s Soul.”
“Most scrapbookers are, you know, married and have children, statistically,” she said. “It’s amazing, though, that you still run into people who think that’s all there is to scrapbook about.”
But Koller says weddings and babies aren’t the only things that can fill the pages of a scrapbook. She’s scrapbooked about vacations with friends, trips with family members, and even the sometimes winding path of her career.
“I have friends, I have a family, I have my ‘kids’ at school,” said Koller, who is a high school English teacher at Sand Creek.
“I say there’s 10,000 things about me that one day I want people to read about,” she said.
Koller graduated from Eastern Michigan University in 1997 with a degree in psychology, thinking she would be a child psychologist. In 2001, after about four years working as a technology buyer for the Detroit Medical Center, she lost her job to outsourcing. After about a month working for an insurance company, she said, “I literally got up, walked out the door and never went back.”
She decided to go back to school, and earned her teaching certificate from Eastern Michigan University in 2005. She moved from Belleville to start teaching at Sand Creek last fall.
Koller said she started scrapbooking 11 years ago. She was a resident advisor at Eastern and her mother noticed she enjoyed putting together bulletin board displays for her dormitory.
“She said, ‘Well, I’ve heard about this hobby called scrapbooking,’ ” Koller said.
She started teaching scrapbooking classes in 2001.
“I’ve been all over the state teaching,” she said. “Bay City, Saginaw, down here, Roseville. All over.”
Koller has started a scrapbooking club at Sand Creek and also integrates some scrapbooking-related skills into her lessons, such as when her students put together display boards for a project on Julius Caesar. She is also a freelance writer who edits the newsletter of BasicGrey, a Utah-based scrapbooking company.
When she heard about the upcoming “Chicken Soup” book, Koller said, she realized it was a perfect opportunity to tell her story about the woman who asked what in the world she had to scrapbook about — “because I’d been telling that story for years.”
http://www.lenconnect.com/articles/2006/08/30/news/news04.txt