Petra Martin

Petra Martin is the owner of Heron Lake Press and the creator of Mixed Emotions, a tool that helps people put their feelings into words. She also owns the Whidbey Island Writer’s Refuge. Before moving to Whidbey Island, she spent nearly 15 years as a writer and editor in public relations and in software documentation.  

In her (extremely little) spare time, Petra enjoys photography, knitting, spinning yarn, reading, and farming. She and her son have 10 chickens, two ducks, four goats, a hive of bees, and a livestock guardian dog.

Petra’s raison d’etre is her 10-year-old son Adrian.

Here are 25 random things about me

  1. There’s a needle in my left foot. It’s been there since I stepped on it in the 6th grade.
  2. I have an extra vertebra.
  3. My lateral incisors (and a number of other teeth) never came in. I’m thinking they all went to that extra vertebra.
  4. My mother (Irmgard) was born and raised in Germany, though she is now a U.S. citizen.
  5. My son’s father (Reiner) is a German citizen, which makes Adrian 75 percent German. 
  6. I speak a regional dialect of German (Swabian). 
  7. When a college professor (noting that my name is Petra) asked whether I speak German, I replied, “Schwäbisch” (Swabian). He said, “Schade ” (What a pity).
  8. Petra means rock. It is the feminine version of Peter. My middle name is Elisabeth, spelled with an s. 
  9. My “maiden” name is Roush. It is an Americanized version of Rausch, which means drunk in German. I did not get one single, normal, easy to spell and pronounce name when I was born.
  10. When Reiner and I got divorced, I took Adrian’s middle name (Martin) as my last name. 
  11. Some of my nicknames have been: Petroleum, Petrified Wood, Petronadon, Petrocelli, Petron Bomb, Tron, Tronski, Pebbles, Pepper, and (still) Pete. I had it easy, though. One of my brother’s nicknames was “Thomaseeny-with-the-teeny-weeny.” 
  12. I am the eldest of three children. My brother Tom lives in Seattle and my sister “Evi” lives in Virginia.
  13. I had a newspaper route when I was a kid. I delivered The Tacoma News Tribune on one side of the railroad tracks in Roy, Washington, and Tom delivered papers on the other side.
  14. Roy is a very small town south of Tacoma and is home to the Roy Pioneer Rodeo (yeehaw). Our mom still lives there.
  15. My mother was in the Bund Deutscher Mädel, or “League of German Girls,” which is what the Hitler Youth for girls was called. (She didn’t have a choice. No one did.)
  16. Her brother and fatherwere both drafted by Hitler toward the end of the war. They thought Hitler was the Antichrist and my grandma got in trouble for not “Heil Hitler-ing”.
  17. I own the bed that my mother was conceived in.
  18. When I was little in Germany, I got a coffee bean stuck up my nose and had to be anesthetized to get it out.
  19. Also in Germany, I found some turpentine in a Coca Cola bottle and drank it.
  20. I have never broken a bone, but my jaw is held together by titanium plates.
  21. My father was in the military, and I’ve never figured out why that made me a brat.
  22. I went to Kindergarten in Washington, Germany, and Illinois; first grade in California; second grade in Germany (the school my mother attended as a child), third, fourth and fifth grades in a different school in Illinois, and the rest in Washington state.
  23. I am an introvert. I love talking to people one on one, but am absolutely miserable at parties.
  24. I was once a Sunday school teacher, youth group leader, camp counselor, and an RA in a dorm at a Christian university.
  25. I’m planning to get married again on 11/11/11 at 11:11 a.m., although I don’t know yet to whom.