WHO IS VOLKSWOMAN?
Story and Photography by Lois Grace

Some of you may know me from my years of writing the VolksWoman column for VW Trends magazine. Some of you may be friends I know, and some of you may be friends I haven't met yet. All of you share a common passion with me: Volkswagens. My own passion for our favorite little car goes back to childhood, but without going into all those details, I'd like to just say that one of my secondary interests is writing. Writing about something you care deeply about helps make the finished product interesting to read, and I have cared about Volkswagens since my dad bought a certain Dove Blue 1959 Single Cab pickup in 1967. From that day on I was hooked.

I graduated from college with a minor in English, so it was only natural that I should fall into writing at some point - my first foray into the field was writing for the Volkswagen Club of America's newsletter, The Autoist, in 1987. My Single Cab had recently been restored at that point, which gave me a lot of material to use for a column I had inherited from the previous writer. I still write for the Autoist today, and enjoy it a great deal. I have also written stories and articles for the VW Connection (VW Club of Connecticut), The Old Bus Review (newsletter for NEATO Northeast Area Transporter Owners) Free Loop, GASS (German Air Sucker Society), and all kinds of independent publications. But the highlight of my writing career so far has been the 6 years I spent with VW Trends magazine. Editor Ryan Price did an admirable job of turning what was basically a second-rate hobby magazine into a first-class publication with articles and columns its readers could actually use and enjoy. When the magazine went out of publication early in 2005, I was as surprised as everyone else. But one thing you learn very early in this business is that you take nothing for granted, and that the publishing business can be extremely brutal. For that reason, if you write you just pick up your pen (or keyboard) and keep going.

At any rate, I hope to continue my Volkswagen stories here on this website and hope that you will enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy telling them. Without people like Wayne Dean to offer the space, plus his time and trouble, writers like myself wouldn't have the outlet we need to do what we love. So, thank you Wayne, for helping me continue to tell my stories, old and new.