Today we’d like to introduce you to Diana Ha.
Hi Diana, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I sat at my desk gulping air like I had just surfaced from the ocean bottom. And the treasure I’d brought up from the deep wasn’t gold bars from a shipwreck. It was myself. Having just turned 40, I had started blogging, finding with each page of life I shared on A Holistic Journey that writing was my oxygen. I had disappeared into the demands of motherhood, seeking the best for my son from home birth to home school, forgetting that writing was how I breathe—and, it turned out, how I make people laugh and cry. As my readership flourished, I pushed against the constraints of a niche audience, testing the things I could do on my platform. I did as I wanted (even danced at the milestone of my first 1000 followers). Single guys, parents, baby boomers joined me to discuss art, achievement, faith and add their two cents as I poked fun at men and (sometimes) women. I designed forums, hosting bloggers from all corners of the world to explore questions of culture, identity, and money. But it was only two years ago that I realized what I’d really been doing was collecting stories. I curated stories to connect people across the globe and edited guest posts to present writers at their best. I had set out on the road I walk today where I help writers ages 8 to 80 find their clearest, most compelling voice. With a bachelors in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and a masters in education from Temple, I headed the Gifted and Talented Education program and taught composition at California Baptist University. Blogging, though, taught me how to write not like I’m educated but like I’m human. I learned to draw people through story, a double-sided mirror in which readers look for themselves. The stories we capture—personal, familial, historical, cultural—in the magical exchange of reading and writing build bridges across time and distance.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
As gratifying as I find my work with students as a college prep coach, it’s a swim against digital tides. Phone texts and videos increasingly have replaced books for high schoolers who also have AI to do their thinking for them if they choose. Students eat three meals a day but go months and years without consuming quality language and then stare at the blank page when it comes time for college application essays. Books are food for the brain. Without a mental store of words, students have little to draw on to build sentences and also face SAT and ACT pages with holes cut out—all the words they don’t recognize. It is painful meeting high school students who don’t know what a noun is. We live in an age of convenience and hacks, but you can’t hack your way to competitive colleges and respected professional roles that call for robust communication skills. I often feel like the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin, tasked to spin straw into gold.
From my experience, no education sector has come through our digital transformation unscathed. The majority, students from homeschool, private, and public school families (those who can afford only a few sessions as well as the affluent) come to me verbally undernourished, but those who grew up reading outside school move a lot faster with me.
In 12 years of formal education, students don’t hear why they are expected to read and write and what these things do for the mind and person. I teach families in my literacy seminars that books not only develop self-awareness and help us connect with the world but nourish the mind with the possibilities of language, imprinting vocabulary and sentence structures while nurturing critical thinking.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Write Expressions, LLC?
Running on oxygen from the blogging, I went on to publish narratives, social commentary, articles on education, and poetry while homeschooling before freelance editing and leading writing workshops for public, private, and homeschool teachers. As founder of Write Expressions, LLC, I now work with clients and students. For the first (authors and business professionals), I provide VIP coaching and edit books and websites, helping the busy and unsure elevate their writing to its finest. White-glove wordsmithing helps my clients shape their reputation and legacy. The editing, writing, and teaching also led me naturally to the world of college prep where I help students make it to the college of their dreams with strong verbal SAT and ACT scores and standout essays. My clients and students find themselves editing bestsellers and The New York Times. If you’re old enough to remember The Matrix, you can call me Morpheus. Once you take the pill from my hand, you can’t unsee the ubiquitous habits that hold writers back.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
Meeting talented, caring professionals in the community—through the Johns Creek Chamber of Commerce, for instance—has been delightful. It’s a beautiful thing when we can step into each other’s story with ready support. In a class all his own, Emmy-award winning former television producer Rushion McDonald who made his mark in Hollywood enabled me recently to share my concern over our literacy crisis on his radio podcast Money Making Conversations. With humility and easy joy, Rushion makes guests feel as though he is their biggest fan and that they have more greatness in them to mine. I pay forward the encouragement and inspiration in a special quarterly dinner I host for C-Suite executives, investors, entrepreneurs, and leaders in government. BYOB. Not Bring Your Own Beer but Bring Your Own Book. That is, a page out of a book they’ve written or the one their heart beats to write. We pause in our hurry to share the stories we’ve always wanted to, forging authentic connections. We are strivers, survivors, creators, and lifelong learners in the holistic journey.
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