Kaitlin Ann Webber was born Debra Ann Trepanier in Chatham, Ontario, Canada in 1955.
Inquisitive, bright and creative, Debra spent hours alone, using her imagination to keep her company. Still, she also loved people and and performning and telling stories for them. Her inquisitive character and love of nature always drew her outdoors to explore and examine. Yet it was her love of and knack with words and numbers that promoted the schools to encourage a university education, focusing on business.
Growing up in a primarily blue-collar town in southern Ontario, Debra's creative aspirations were soon quashed and buried as she was directeed to forget the arts as a feasible way of life and living.
After a difficult youth, amplifoed by a very high sensitivity, Debra experienced a great deal of angst because of the repression of her creativity. Combined with other challenges, Debra acted out, and of course, to her own detriment. Leaving high school early to marry at age 16 when she became Debra Ann Smith, she had dropped from being an A student to a deliquent, non-attending and failing student.
However, five years later, Debra settled into the mainstream of living responsibly in her new home in Kindardine, in southwest Ontario and in her new married life as Debra Ann Webber. A high achiever, who found another outlet to grow with, Debra became an Assistant Manager of a medium-sized department store in her early 20's as her visual merchandising, mathematical, organizational and management skills rose to serve her employers well.
With her growing success at Krupps Market where she next became a key member of the management team, she was inspired to acquire her Grade 12 Equivalency before leaving Kincardine to attend a private business school, where she performed as Student Council Treasurer and Newsletter Editor above her studies that rewarded her with an Honours in Business Administration, as well as the Phi Beta Scholarship Award for Outstanding Student Cooperation as selected by the teaching faculty and also earned her first year exemption to the CGA accounting program.
Debra's next move was to Toronto (Pickering actually ) that was initiated by her husband's transfer and introduced her to the corporate ife of Levi Strauss & Co. Canada. For seven years, she immersed herself completely as always in her work, this time in financial planning, operations planning and human resources, while serving as the Community Involvement Team Treasurere for six years. One of Debra's special projects and above the call of duty successes was her creation of an automated production planning tool that reduced the Operation Planning's monthly planning cycle cy 40 hours per month, for which she received worldwide recognition.
It wasn't until age 35, when all her success and material gains left her wanting - nothing filled the voice she carried - that Debra began her search for and discovered "the original in her."
Due to the internal drive to fill that void, Debra then undertook the work to under-stand why there was a void and how to fill it. Through a very intense study of psychology, in part at York Univesity, plus studies of social science, mythology, philosophy, spirituality and others found her working with various individuals, in person and in many, many book, so that she could change her life by changing her perspective to fill that void.
AS A JOURNALIST, AUTHOR, POET and
PLAYWRIGHT
Finally in her late thirties, Debra found the buried treasure of her creative writing. As someone who had optimally utilized her written and oral communication skills for employers in her primarily liaison role, she now moved out into the creative publishing world.
Words held back in check, by conditioned psychological barriers for many years, finally poured out in torrents, finally freed. Reams and reams of paper were filled with poems and stories. A first book of prose and poetry was written and accepted for publication, but the author declined, recognizing that her first book was primarily a cathartic tool that serviced its purpose for her alone and was not be shared with others in order to respect the privacy of the people in her history.
And though Debra was discovering "the original in her," many of her family and friends were not amused, were even confused and scared by this new person who quit the corporate world in eager haste, professing life as an artist was all she needed.
Many changes occurred, including the death of a ninteen-year marriage. Still, she harboured the impoverished starving artist thinking and as with many of artists' stories, she became the stereotype - the starving artist after all, even with the successes she experienced. Eventually, discouraged and disheartened, she withdrew from society, embarrassed and ashamed for not being an overnight success, for not getting it all right the first time.
Putting down the pen, she chided, was the only thing to do, but only after she had written in a few years almost 700 poems, 50 stories, a book and was paid for her words.
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AS A VISUAL ARTIST
As with the creative writing, drawing too had become a buried treasure to be rediscovered, but with the freeing of her originality from the personal work she had done, she was delightfully surprised that drawing was indeed something she could do and do well, though she had not tried since she was a child.
But the need to visually create was always there. She utilized her skills as a visual merchandiser/display artist for employers over the years, yet it wasn't until she attended another college for Design and Communication studies that her talent was affirmed, again scoring A's for her creativity and growing, though still young, artistic abilities. click here for next page