Midwest Mix Magazine

Audrey Kletscher Helbling

More than four decades ago, Audrey Kletscher Helbling’s writing career began while sitting behind her desk at Vesta Elementary School practicing penmanship, swooping rows and rows of “o’s” between the lines and across the page, just like the teacher said.

Her skills later expanded beyond neat writing to writing. Her first published works appeared in The Rabbit Tracks, the Wabasso High School student newspaper.

Soon thereafter, Audrey left her childhood farm, exchanging rock picking, feeding cows and calves, walking beans and scooping manure for studying journalism.

She graduated from Minnesota State University, Mankato, in 1978 with a mass communications major and an English minor, then became a general assignment reporter and photographer for The Gaylord Hub. She worked for several other weekly and daily newspapers in Minnesota before taking time off to raise her family—two daughters, now grown, and a teenaged son, still at home in Faribault.

Audrey eventually resumed writing and has been published in magazines, devotionals, two books, poetry anthologies and greeting cards. She’s also been an avid blogger for the past 18 months.

When she isn’t writing, Audrey is usually reading, a passion instilled years ago when an elementary teacher read classic books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Little House series and Black Beauty aloud to students each day after lunch.

Audrey also enjoys photography, growing flowers, playing badminton and shopping garage sales for the vintage tablecloths and drinking glasses she collects.

While not much of a traveler, Audrey savors trips with her husband and son back to her hometown of Vesta in southwestern Minnesota. She appreciates the starkness of the prairie, its wide open spaces, the big skies, this place that shaped who she has become as a writer.