iDivamemphis.com was conceived and is maintained by me, Leanne Kleinmann.

I’ve been a journalist most of my career.

I started out working as an editor and writer (OK, at first I was a secretary) for women’s magazines in New York, including McCall’s, Seventeen and Health magazines. Magazines are my first love, and living in New York was a total blast, even though I shared an apartment with two other people and ate a lot of macaroni and cheese.

After that, I got married, and since my new husband decided to go to grad school at Northwestern outside Chicago, I got a gig as an adjunct journalism professor at the Medill School of Journalism there, which turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.

To supplement the pennies I was being paid to teach, I began doing freelance magazine writing. My goal: Get someone to pay me to go places and do things I’d always wanted to do anyway. It worked, too. When my husband got selected to study in Denmark for six months, I spent the entire time ‘on assignment’ in Rome, Paris, Germany, England and the Berner Oberland in Switzerland, where the memory of the inn-to-inn hike through the mountains still makes me wistful.

Sometimes I even made money.

Eventually Andy and I found ourselves in Memphis, on what was always meant to be a short-term break from our agreed-upon plan of living in Chicago or some other large Midwestern city.

That was in 1990.

Memphis was a revelation to me: The smallest place I’d ever lived, it seemed to be a city so rich in history it sometimes choked on it. When we arrived, I was the only ‘working wife’ in Andy’s entire office.

My first job in Memphis was a revelation, too: As the first girl to edit Memphis Magazine, I could ask all of the pesky questions that newcomers ask, and actually find out the answers. And I loved it, from getting an early look at the view from the top of the Pyramid to meeting the Rev. Billy Kyles, the man to whose house Dr. King was going the day he was murdered at the Lorraine Motel.

I came to The Commercial Appeal as the features editor (what else was I qualified for, really?) a few years later, and lived it up with the terrific writers and a daily deadline. Any story we could figure out, we could do. It was a happy time.

Imagine my surprise, then, that a tiny boy would divert me from my single-minded obsession with journalism. Our son Tomas arrived in 1999, and nothing has been the same since.

Andy no longer works for the Big Company that moved us down here. He’s a consultant and Internet entrepreneur who brings our dog, C.B., with him to the office.

And I no longer worry most about how to get to the next-highest job or where we really ought to be living. My worries now involve spelling words and basketball practice. On good days.

Most days are pretty good.