Leeanne Seaver is a journalist, an editor, a ghost writer. She is the co-founder of the Global Coalition of Parents of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children. She is involved in the arts community of her hometown of Vicksburg. She is the owner of Seaver Creative Services. Often the voice behind the voice, Seaver talks about how her many interests led to becoming a ghost writer.
“Finding out how to flesh out the story and the luxury of having lots and lots of pages is so much fun!” Seaver says.
She became a ghost writer only after 25 years of working in broadcasting, working at television stations in Virginia and Colorado. Seaver is also the founder of Hands & Voices and now on the board of the Global Coalition of Parents of Deaf/Hard of Hearing Children.
“I was working in television at the time,” Seaver says. “We discovered after a long time not knowing what was going on for Dane, our oldest son, that he was profoundly deaf. It’s sort of my style to take something like that on triumphally, robustly, and I found other people, a few of them who like me thought the way to do this is to find out what works for the kid, not to fit into a mold that professionals had for them.” Today, Hands & Voices has chapters throughout the United States.
Now a full-time writer, Seaver focuses on telling the stories of others. “[Ghost writing] is not the only kind of writing I do,” she says. “This is one of the things that broadcasting positioned me quite well for. I was already used to not getting credit for things I had written. You don’t even think about it in that sense… I guess it might have been hard to come to this if I already had books out there with my name on them.”
After several such projects, Seaver now does have her name appear on book covers. Passionate about her work, she spends as much as a year interviewing her subject to learn not only the story to be told but to also capture the person’s voice. The work, however, does not come without something of an occupational hazard.
“I feel that my own voice sometimes gets subordinated and sidelined for so long that I need to go … somewhere to clear my head and look for the part of me that has things to say in her own voice for her own reasons. It’s very challenging.”
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