[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
image: courtesy Kim Singer”][/title]
Just last month, while on a trip to Atlanta, Kaci Singer considered what it would be like to live in such a big place. Traffic everywhere, noise that never stopped, throngs of people hurrying. It was a little overwhelming for this small town girl who loves the slow pace of Fort Smith, Arkansas, the place she’s called home for twenty-two of the twenty-five years she’s been on this planet.
While she was in Atlanta, she started up a conversation with a man waiting for the same train as she was. He’d not been to Arkansas, so she described it to him: the wide rivers, the lush mountains, the sprawling trees that form canopies across roadways. Finally, she narrowed down how her home felt in one word: peaceful.
Kaci thought of the word “peaceful” again late that night in her hotel when sleep was interrupted by the sounds of police cars and ambulances and fire trucks. She didn’t relax until she was back home, surrounded by the places she loves, close to the people who make it home.
Two of those people are her parents: Matthew and Kim Singer. Matthew is a veterinarian in Greenwood, and Kim is a well known photographer. Kaci talks about what it was like to grow up with the two of them guiding her. She watched them work hard, and they cared deeply about what they did.
Her path, however, was not so easily found. She majored in English at the University of Arkansas – Fort Smith. After graduating in 2012, she thought about teaching, something her parents thought she’d enjoy. But what they hadn’t factored in was that she’d been watching them make their own way her entire life, not working for anyone else. Teaching, while a noble calling, was not for her.
What she did love was writing, particularly blogging, and so she did that on her personal webpage. She’d write about what life was like in Fort Smith. Sometimes she’d write about fashion. But always she wrote. At the end of a long day, it’s what she looked forward to.
It’s impossible to love the written word and not love paper. Books, Kaci adored. But she also adored stationery, greeting cards, wrapping paper. So she started doing her homework, looking for products she thought others might like as well. That’s what led her to Atlanta last month, to market, to stock her new store, named Paperwerk, which will open on April 15 inside Fort Smith’s BrickCity, a collective of small shops.
Kaci hopes one day to have her own storefront where she’ll have more space to expand. As she’s saying this, she pulls a sheath of papers from her bag. She has organized every product she’ll carry, every contract, every vital part of running a business into this one portable file. She smiles, talking about what’s still ahead, what’s just over the horizon.
As for blogging, that’s evolving as well. Her focus used to be her personal life but now she writes about her hometown. In February of this year, she unveiled her new website, Follow Me Fort Smith. On it, she writes about things like the UA-Fort Smith baseball team winning three games in a row on a recent weekend. She also writes about businesses in town, places small enough to get to know you, to ask after your family, to remember how you take your coffee, or what your favorite color is.
Since her venture began, her Follow Me Fort Smith Facebook page has gained attention. Kaci smiles when she talks about how her idea took off. She’d been following Courtney Kerr, a Texas blogger, for quite some time, and she loved what she saw. Courtney is a fashion expert who quit her career in retail to blog. Since that time, she’s snagged a role on a Dallas morning show, where she co-hosts with three other women.
And while Courtney writes about fashion, not hometown life – her latest post is filled with photos from an afternoon she spent with actress Sarah Jessica Parker – Kaci believes the fundamentals of successful blogging will help her succeed.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get my own TV show,” Kaci says, and then she laughs. “I’m not really after that. I just want to promote Fort Smith, to get a lot of followers. That’s success to me.”
Kaci is dressed in jeans with cuffs rolled up far enough to show off a pair of suede heels Sarah Jessica Parker would surely swoon over. She looks as if she could easily take on a blog about fashion, but that’s not where her heart lies. “I just like living in a town where I wave at everybody when I drive around,” she says, and then shrugs, as if that explains every reason she had for starting her website.
It truly does. This land that she loves, this place she describes to strangers as peaceful, is the only home she’s ever wanted. Life here is slow and easy. Most everybody has a heart of gold. That’s what she was trying to tell the man she met recently in Atlanta. Kaci’s learned early a lesson some of us never quite grasp: loving where you live makes everything in your life so much better, makes every day a little sweeter, and every year that passes that much dearer.
