Welcome to another episode of From Montana to Portugal. I’m your host Janelle Holden. I write a Substack newsletter called From Montana to Portugal and occasionally I invite people onto this podcast to explore topics of travel, culture, immigration, and international living. Today my guest is another Substack writer and author LaDonna Witmer. I deeply appreciate her work and love her care with words.

LaDonna left the United States in the middle of the pandemic and emigrated to Portugal with her family (husband, kid, dog, parrot). In previous lives in Chicago and San Francisco, LaDonna was a newspaper journalist, advertising copywriter, brand voice expert, editorial director, public speaker, and poetry slammer.

After relocating to the Portuguese countryside south of Lisbon, LaDonna creates words for other people as a freelance writer and editor and writes her own words in personal essays and poetry that occasionally get published in journals and magazines. She also writes regularly at The Long Scrawl on Substack.

LaDonna has written one full-length memoir that is currently being shopped around to publishers and is knee-deep in work on a second memoir about her upbringing in a fundamentalist religious community in rural Illinois.

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