About Me — Lisa Duffy-Korpics

Writer, Teacher, Wife, Mom, Grandma, Loser of Keys…

My daughter Emma and me at her Senior Year Powderpuff Football Game in 2015. I was there to watch but also got paid as a chaperone since I was a teacher. Win/Win. Photo by author.

Writing Stuff And How I Got Here

I’m the author of Tales from a Dog Catcher © 2009 Lyons Press Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield. It wasn’t easy or quick — most importantly — nobody gets anywhere alone.

I’d started writing for local magazines and newspapers because I could do this at night while my children were sleeping and still care for them during the day as well as help my disabled Mom. Eventually, I found I could make a little money at this if I sort of stopped sleeping at all and wrote more for local magazines that would pay for some groceries or half the electric bill. I won a timely Writer’s Digest Competition about dog stories that paid for my December 1998 mortgage payment when my husband’s new job was cut on Christmas Eve and I was trying to be a stay-at-home Mom for a while to that girl in the above photo who was 18 months old at the time and her older brother who’d started Kindergarten. Days later before foreclosure proceedings would’ve started, I would interview for a teaching position at a high school 35 miles away. Soon after I was hired we would move closer. I taught there for 25 years, combined with prior service I completed my 30.3 years of teaching for NYS a few months ago and retired in June 2023.