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About
TL Johnstone - Author
I've mistaken where I belong more times than I can count!
I'm a city girl who became a country wife, a runner who lost the use of her legs. I've been a coach who discovered the land had more wisdom than any program she'd ever studied. Eventually, I became a marketer who started hearing messages in the ravens, the trees, and the grass, and I learned that writing was the only honest way to translate them.
At 39, my immune system turned on itself. Within weeks, I went from running half marathons on Sunday mornings to being unable to lift my head from a pillow or swallow food. Turned out to be Myositis, which is a rare and aggressive autoimmune condition that impacts my muscles. It is also horrifically humbling in a way that nothing else ever had been. The medications that followed were brutal. The journey back was longer. But the land had things to teach me that the illness had made me quiet enough to hear.
Years later, I found myself running, operating, and writing for the Leaning Lounge Golf & Country. My husband and I carved nine scrappy holes from an old cattle ranch in heartland Alberta. It was there, in the back field at dusk, watching the sunsets and listening to the ravens, that something changed permanently.
The sunsets stopped being scenery. The ravens stopped being birds. The stories stopped being optional.
Tales from the Leaning Lounge is my debut novel and is my effort to translate what the land has been saying all along. It's about mistaking where you belong. It's about the sacred, terrifying act of choosing where you stand.
If you've ever stood in the wrong life, wondering how you got there, you're going to feel this book in your bones.
I'm still writing it. And I'm glad you found your way here while I am.
