Welcome
Welcome to the official website of author Jody Ewing.
Jody has worked as a professional writer for the past 20 years. Her published credits include more than 400 feature stories and articles, an Iowa Cold Case series, an author interview series, the book "One Way: Bumps and Detours on the Road to Adulthood," the Amazon Short "Pull," and many other writing/editing projects including both original and commissioned screenplay adaptations.
Her Sioux City, IA, cold case series spawned the Iowa Cold Cases website, which Jody launched in December 2005 and continues to expand to include other Iowa cities and counties.
In addition to her writing, Jody has worked on numerous political campaigns, ran for the Iowa legislature in 2002, worked as communications director for congressional candidate Bob Chambers and has served as county chair for four presidential candidates. She currently is an elected member of the Iowa Democratic Party's State Central Committee.
Her highly anticipated (to Gov. Bill Richardson, anyway) "Kids, Dogs and Democrats Running Wild: Campaigning for Sanity in Iowa" -- a seriocomic political memoir in progress -- details the fast-moving roller-coaster ride Jody and partner Dennis Ryan took through four back-to-back election cycles, where energetic campaigns and victory celebrations ofttimes collided head-on with personal tragedies on the home-front.
The couple's fourth foray into the political maelstrom met almost immediately with two more intensely personal incidents: the senseless death of Jody's stepfather, Earl Thelander, in an explosion caused by copper thieves, and, six days following his funeral, her mother's Stage III breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent mastectomy.
"Her entire life parallels an epic novel filled with all these magnificent challenges, yet she's faced them all with such unwavering courage and optimism she couldn't help but emerge the true heroine she is," Jody says. "She always told me, 'Everything happens for a reason,' and seems to have this innate sense of how all life's jagged pieces somehow fit together to create a beautiful whole."
Jody credits that strength for her own determination to make a difference in the lives of others through her political activism and writing.
In addition to Kids, Dogs and Democrats Running Wild, her other works in progress include "The Darling of the Neighborhood" (a true crime story based on the 1955 Sioux City, IA, unsolved rape and murder of 22-month-old Donna Sue Davis); "R.O.'s Army" (a joint memoir she's writing with her 18-year-old son about the years preceding his Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis), and a complete re-write of her novel "Major Renovations."