A Writer’s Biography

Renovations continue behind the scenes at the Not Now Silly Newsroom. To that end I have been prepping several thingies to be posted on the back end of the site. Believing in letting none of my precious words go to waste, here’s my bio written in the 3rd person:

Calling himself “A liberally progressive, sarcastically cynical, iconoclastic polymath,” Headly Westerfield has been a professional writer all his adult life. One of his first jobs out of college in the ’70s, was writing and editing Cheap Thrills, the house organ for Concert Productions International club members in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In subsequent years he wrote for a plethora of magazines and newspapers (where a word like “plethora” is appreciated) including Record Week, The Globe and Mail, The Record, Tribute Magazine, Yorkview Magazine, Toronto Magazine, and The Hamilton Spectator. Of particular note is his decade as a News Writer at Citytv, at the time the highest-rated news shows in Toronto (for those who care about such things).

His regular column in Toronto’s We Compute was ground-breaking: the first (ironically) printed guide to navigating the nascent World Wide Web, just getting nicknamed the Information Superhighway. Long before the Googalizer, Headly Westerfield was sharing links with his readers, a tradition the Not Now Silly Newsroom continues to this very day.

In a writing career of 40+ years, he’s been an Investigative Journalist; Record Reviewer; Entertainment Reporter; Hollywood Fluffer; Rock and Roll Interviewer; and Corporate Shill, writing the ad copy for an award-winning brochure praising Scarborough, Ontario, as well as promotional material for several record companies, a number of bands, and a few restaurants.

As Westerfield has often joked, “I’ve done every kind of writing there is, except for Greeting Cards.”

Once he moved back to the States — just in time for Hurricane Wilma to go right over his condo — Westerfield launched “Aunty Em’s Place” and began free-lancing for various websites including NewsHounds (under the trolling nom de plume Aunty Em Ericann), PoliticusUSA, CurbedMiami, and Stones Detroit. And, he loves long sentences.

With his decade in the CityPulse Newsroom, years writing about the Fox “News” Effect,
and ‘tear sheets’ on a wide variety of topics, Headly
Westerfield is uniquely qualified to write about any subject he may wish to tackle.

In 2012 he created the Not Now Silly Newsroom, which has been his main outlet for investigative journalism, media punditry, and fun with words ever since.

This doesn’t quite feel finished, but I’ve still got some time before it’s posted on the back-end of the new and improved Not Now Silly Newsroom. I’m debating whether to add a paragraph documenting the many other jobs I’ve had in my life that did not involve writing. However, this pretty much sums up the highlights of my writing career. You don’t want to hear about the lowlights.

About Headly Westerfield

Calling himself “A liberally progressive, sarcastically cynical, iconoclastic polymath,” Headly Westerfield has been a professional writer all his adult life.

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