"If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.... If you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time."
-- Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth

Who is Lawrence Haftl? A guy who needed more than four decades to find his bliss, and now that he's found it he follows it wherever it takes him.

For the last six years I've worked full-time as a freelance journalist, photographer and videographer. During that time I've had more than two hundred articles and numerous photos published in national and international magazines. I also produced a video documentary that won a regional Emmy award, and a promotional video that was instrumental in raising money for the National Wildland Firefighters' Memorial in Boise, Idaho.

While my training is in journalism and I work exclusively in non-fiction, I think of myself as a storyteller. There are true stories about real people that have all the storm and fury, all the lessons and morals of our best fictional literature, but these stories have a greater potential to affect our lives simply because they're true, they really happened.

Finding these stories, rescuing them from oblivion and bringing them into the light of a larger audience so that they may help us improve our lives and/or our world is very much a part of my bliss.

Before I found my bliss and got into this journalism racket I did jobs as widely varied as commercial fisherman and corporate suit, concrete construction contractor and computer systems programmmer and designer. I was really good at some of them, not as good at others, but managed to learn something new and useful with each one.

My interests are far more numerous than the ones I focus on in my work, but there are so many great stories out there and so little time to find and tell them that I rarely get to dabble in other areas. It's not much of a problem though, because I'm usually having way too much fun "working." It's a tough job but... :)

¤ Something I wrote made the difference in saving a firefighter's life. That will probably always be my top trophy.

¤ I Have a 26-year old son who has turned out to be a strong, sensitive, perceptive, intelligent and honorable person.

¤ Earned a MS degree, with honors, in Journalism and Communication from the University of Oregon - 1998*

¤ Earned a BS degree, with honors, in Journalism and Communication from the University of Oregon - 1996

¤ Accepted into Kappa Tau Alpha, the honor society for journalists - 1996

¤ Earned an AS degree in Electronic Engineering Technology and another one in General Science, both with honors, from Lane Community College - 1993

¤ Accepted into Phi Theta Kappa, the honor society for two-year degree programs - 1993

¤ Won a regional Emmy for a documentary I produced about the flood that wiped out Heppner, Oregon in 1906 (still shows sometimes on Oregon Public Broadcasting along with three others I worked on)