Check Out Annie Toro Lopez’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Annie Toro Lopez.

Hi Annie, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I often say that I have worn many hats. From bookstore manager to vet tech, middle school teacher, artist, and writer’s coach/editor, I have taken a rather Ben Franklin-style approach to life–learn all I can, while I can, allow both my creative self and my intellectual self to merge, and experience life to the fullest. Also much like Franklin, I have always been drawn to words.

My love of language led me to pursue a degree in English from Metro State University of Denver. A single mother of two teenagers, I was committed to earning my degree and showing my daughter and son that it’s never too late to work towards important goals and that hard work pays off. My volunteer work with Kempe Children’s Foundation and my community service as a firefighter helped me to earn several scholarships, including the Metro Alumni Scholarship, which allowed me to finish my senior year of college without worrying about tuition and graduate with high honors. The scholarship, along with boarding and training dogs, allowed me to work from home and to, as we like to say, put mac and cheese on the table because that was what we could afford.

Getting through school was a challenge. I was newly divorced from my rocket scientist ex-husband, who designed the communication antennae for missions to Mars, and who, literally, lived on Martian time, eventually leaving us worlds apart. The small, 5-acre farm we had purchased together was three years into a 30-year mortgage, and I didn’t think I would ever be able to keep it. I was sure it was the most land I would ever own, and, having grown up in the wide-open spaces of the Nebraska Sandhills, my love for the land runs deep. I was determined to do all I could to hold on to my farm, even though I was equally determined to earn my degree.

The commute to school was consistently brutal. A minimum of 70 minutes, and usually even longer because the year that I returned to college was the same year that the T-rex project along the I-25 corridor began, laying the tracks for the now ubiquitous light rail system. Since my choice was often between gas for my car, food on the table, or a roof over our heads, I usually drove to the nearest RTD station and took a bus to the main train station on Broadway, which took me to the then end of the line for the train. From Broadway, I was able to take the train to Metro. That, of course, isn’t counting getting my kids to and from two different schools, neither with bus service to our farm in Elizabeth. Those were tired days, indeed!

The days were tiring, but the rewards were great. I earned my degree in English Literature and Linguistics and felt called to teach professionally. For nearly a decade, I taught middle school Literacy and Social Studies, specifically, Early American History, in Aurora Public Schools, one of the most linguistically diverse school districts in the country. I loved my time working with young teenagers. I learned from them every day. Our conversations, debates, and exchange of ideas around literature allowed us to explore the world, and ourselves, together on common ground and in safe space. My students came first as people, and academics were secondary. I was there to foster their relationship with literature and facilitate a healthier and more fulfilling relationship with themselves and the world around them.

As much as I loved my students, I left the public education system with a bad case of burnout from dealing with a broken, underappreciating, bureaucratic system that had begun to feel like a cage. Not long after, following a difficult surgery, I had a near-death experience when I nearly bled out from an accidentally severed artery. The experience left me physically weak but determined to live life with authenticity, which, for me, meant the life of an artist. My husband, Don, had recently retired from a 32-year career serving the people of Colorado with CDOT as a highway engineer, and since he supports my wide variety of adventures unconditionally, we set off on an unplanned two-and-a-half-month trip down the Pacific coast. Along the way, I worked on a forced perspective photography project with toy dinosaurs. Yes, that’s right. Toy dinosaurs. The art from that project has found several homes including the gift shop at Dinosaur Ridge in Morrison, and my dinosaurs will soon have a children’s book about them, as well as a home in an online art gallery.

Some of the most gratifying work I have done is as a seed preservationist. My work with seeds and food security grew from taking my students on an annual trip to Washington DC. As part of our tour, we always visited Mt. Vernon, the home of George Washington and since the trip was in May, it coincided with the docents’ annual seed and plant sale as a fundraiser for the historic site. The first time I purchased a packet of sunflower seeds from George Washington’s garden and planted them on my own little plot of land on the high prairie, I was hooked! The thought of growing seeds from a flower grown from such a prestigious and historic garden ignited my imagination. I soon had collected seeds from Shakespeare’s garden, and Van Gogh’s Rostov Sunflower, and seeds grown in the garden of Georgia O’Keeffe. I was captivated by the stories and histories of strains of corn, beans, and squash, or The Three Sisters, as this trio is often referred to. Stories of handing down favorite cucumber or tomato seeds from one generation to the next captivated me. And I came to understand the implications of losing those strains to seeds sold in big box stores and the dangers of monoculture cultivation.

The more I learned about seed preservation, the more I understood the urgency we face in protecting and adapting our existing seed population. According to the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance, our world has lost 80-90% of our seed diversity in the past 100 years. This means that 8 out of 10 varieties of such fruits and vegetables as lettuce, carrots, peppers, tomatoes, onions, etc. have become irretrievably extinct.

Because of this understanding, I have spent the past several years practicing seed stewardship, hosting interns interns at our farm, and going into the community to teach learners of all ages the importance of seed preservation. As part of my community outreach, I have taught several workshops, including yearly classes at Dinosaur Ridge in Morrison, considered the best place to see dinosaur tracks in the world; as well as at the award-winning Downtown Aurora Visual Arts program where my husband and I conducted a workshop to teach kids in a food desert how to grow food from common, household items without spending any money. They learned to save pepper seeds from fruit bought in the grocery store, make soil from leftovers and worms they can find in their yard, and grow seeds in discarded milk containers.

I recently wrote and published “The Writer’s Handbook: An Indispensable Grammar and Style Guide” as a way to help writers tell their stories. So often I have heard, “I have a story to tell, but I don’t know where to begin.” The handbook can help writers with basics like grammar and punctuation, as well as writer’s process, craft, and technique. The guide is designed to be concise and easy to use. The goal is to help people tell their stories because all voices have value.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Life offers all of us no shortage of challenges, and obstacles are part of the human condition. There have been two fairly major obstacles for me, and the key to dealing with both have been learn more about myself and accepting myself, including my struggles. Knowing myself has allowed me to live as my most authentic self and to love and trust myself. Identifying and learning to live with neurodivergence has been a lifelong journey. I did not receive a neurodivergent diagnosis until I was well into adulthood, and this discovery helped me to understand and appreciate my own unique way of interacting with the world around me. My discoveries and understandings about myself ultimately helped me to be a more compassionate teacher and a better writer’s coach. I learned to be much more deliberate in my interactions and more thoughtful about how I respond to the world around me.

The other major obstacle for my life was dealing with the fallout from having a stalker and being sexually abused around the same time that my birth years reached double digits. I received a strong message early in life that the world is not safe and that I was not safe in it. This fear of ‘putting myself out there’ often presented a psychological stumbling block that translated to a generalized anxiety that frequently got in my way. Through my hard work with some great therapists, I’ve learned many tools and strategies to deal with my general anxiety. The work I have done and continue to do in therapy enabled me to do things like go to college, teach middle school, teach workshops, give interviews, and talk about my work and my book. I am quite introverted by nature and can sometimes even be reclusive, but my work in therapy has made that a choice, not a necessity. I enjoy my time in solitude and in nature, and I also seek out compassionate companionship.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
After leaving the classroom, it has taken me some time to grow into my identity as an artist. Giving up the scheduled lifestyle and financially predictability of a professional teaching job for the considerably less structured and secure world of an artist was not an easy decision. Ultimately, the call of freedom and life with a muse was more attractive to me than the bureaucratic brokenness of the public education system. Learning to navigate the world of freelance writing, which is mostly copywriting, and ultimately, selling some product other, allowed me freedom, but the work itself was not particularly gratifying.

I have found considerable artistic expression in my dinosaur photography project. Selecting the dinosaurs alone was an adventure. I was seeking the most accurate toy dinosaurs I could find when the annual Fossil, Gem and Mineral Show was in town at the National Western complex. I found exactly what I was looking for, and little did I know, I was finding SO much more when I stopped by a kiosk run by the education director of Dinosaur Ridge, Erin LaCount. Erin helped me choose four beautiful dinosaur toys and was intrigued by the photography project I was planning. We chatted for a bit, and then I went on my way. We later reconnected when my husband and I attended her lectures at Dinosaur Ridge, and I now teach about where our food comes from and seed preservation at her award-winning, yearly summer camp at Dinosaur Ridge.

Photographing the dinosaurs at a variety of sweeping landscapes and fitting them into the landscape became a personal challenge. We had embarked on a somewhat impromptu trip to the Pacific Northwest, and the travel fueled my imagination. The dinosaurs provided a perfect prehistoric foreground for the Grand Canyon, the red cliffs of Sedona, Arizona, the Snake River Canyon, and so many other scenic backdrops. Currently, I am working to give my dinos broader exposure. They are always well received and appreciated.

As a teacher and a writer, I am finding some of my most gratifying expressions as an artist in coaching writers and helping them to tell their stories. My work as a writer’s coach specializing in memoir and legacy projects has led me to my current project working with indigenous people in Southern Colorado to share their stories, often oral traditions passed down for generations. We are working with local organizations to teach writers’ workshops through a creative aging project. Our project is focused on preserving food memories and family recipes that have been passed down through families for generations. Food and stories are cultural connections, and I am honored and excited to be part of this project.

What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
To be an effective teacher, the most important role is that of a learner and to learn from those around me. My first step, in both teaching and learning is to treat all people, and other creatures for that matter, with unconditional positive regard. This was especially helpful as a middle school teacher, though it applies in all areas of my life. I learned that it’s not possible to love everyone or even to like all people. But everyone deserves unconditional positive regard. Dealing with my middle school students this way gave me a reputation for fairness. My students quickly learned that, while I may not approve of their actions, I would always treat them with respect.

Along a similar vein, I have also learned how important it is to meet people where they are. In education, this is sometimes referred to as the Zone of Proximal Development. Basically, it means that we all have experienced life in our own unique way, and we are all in different places in our understanding of any given topic. In order to reach people, to teach or to speak to an audience effectively, it’s essential to recognize that their understandings may be different than mine. If I want to teach a child to read or write, I don’t start with Shakespeare. To teach someone to read or write, I first have to respect what they already know and move forward from there. Meeting people where they are is true regardless of what we want to help people understand. And our world could really use a whole lot more understanding right about now.

Some of my most difficult lessons have also been the most humbling and the most essential. I can only control myself and how I respond to the world. I cannot control others, and I can’t make anyone do anything they don’t want to do. As a teacher, I can invite others to learn from me, and ultimately it is their choice. Another lesson that was difficult and humbling is that I’m not always right. Boy is that ever a tough one to swallow! I still sometimes find it difficult to believe.

Pricing:

• Writer’s Coach 1:1 Consultation $80/Hr or $125/90 Min
• Proofreading $40 and up
• Editing $60 and up
• The Writer’s Handbook: An Indispensable Grammar and Style Guide $11.95

Contact Info:

• Website: highprairiepress.org
• Facebook: @highprairiepress

Image Credits
Annie Toro Lopez