Vickie Hardin Woods is a retired director of a 100-employee local government department living in Salem, Oregon, who has found new joy in creative nonfiction. She is active in the writer’s community Project Write Now, an organization with a newsletter circulation of 5,000 and a track record of supporting their authors into the literary marketplace. The experience of baking a pie every day formed the basis of Vickie’s TEDx talk, and a February 2026 column in The Guardian received more than 300,000 views.