You also started up Career in Your Suitcase – what’s the story there and how has it expanded?

Career in Your Suitcase began in Stavanger in 1996 when I attended my first women’s professional networking group. I thought I had nothing to say, but when I ended up chatting to the program’s organizer about my writing career spanning nearly a decade and three countries, she asked if I would be the next month’s speaker. I was terrified, but shared what I had learned. They loved it and so I planned both a workshop and a book called Career in Your Suitcase while I was there and ran the workshop with another expat writer, Elizabeth Douet. In March 1998, she and I were invited to run our workshop at a Paris expat women’s conference, called Women on the Move. The book was published in time for this event and received a great reception. I continued to learn about portable careers and write about them as a journalist, and kept on revising the book. In 2013 the fourth edition came out, this time with a Canadian, expat, career counselor as co-author, and Colleen Reichrath-Smith and I are now working on more material. Now that we have the Internet, the time has never been better to have a career in your suitcase.

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