Penelope Michal Croner Reedy (1947- ), writer, newspaper columnist, occasional poet, and founder of The Redneck Review of Literature, was born in Everett, Washington, and attended Lake Stevens High School in Lake Stevens, Washington. She is the daughter of Ralph Warner Croner (1913-1989) and Patricia Ann Elzea Croner Leek (1922- ), and the eldest of five children: Penelope (1947), Shelly Louella (1949-1976), Matthew Ralph (1955), Brian Arch (1957), Suzanne Maria (1960-2004).
Penelope married Jim Reedy (b. 1940), an Idaho cattle rancher living in Camas County, Idaho, where her father was also born and raised. Her grandfather, Frank Croner (born in the late 1870s) homesteaded on the prairie circa 1909. He was first a school teacher who "read law" and became a local attorney, prosecutor and magistrate. Her grandmother was Louella Warner Croner. Reedy's uncles inherited colorful, unusual nicknames: Frank Croner (b. 1901) "Slewfoot"; Waldo Halley Croner (b. 1910) "Toad"; John Alton Croner "Squirrel"; Lt. Col. Charles Ronald Croner "Hickey" and/or "Mooch": James Wellington Croner "Ding." Other siblings included Creighton (died in childhood) and Winifred.
Penelope graduated from high school in 1965 and took a train to New York City where she studied for a year at the Laboratory Institute of Fashion Merchandising. She discovered she was not excited about such a career, preferring to work as a writer. She lived in the city for five years during which she worked as office clerk for the Lutheran Church in America Commission on Worship, a parish worker at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Redeemer in East New York, Brooklyn, and at various retail and office temporary jobs throughout the city, including some peculiar assignments for toilet seat exporters.
Penelope lived on the periphery of social protest both in Brooklyn and after moving to the East Village (508 E. 11th Street) during her last years in NYC. She attended protests and marches against the Viet Nam War, as well as participating in the Poor People's Campaign in Washington D. C.
During her years in NYC, she attended jazz services at St. Peter's Lutheran Church at 54th Street and Lexington Avenue conducted by the Rev. John Gensel. She met several legendary jazz musicians including Duke Ellington. She was at Ellington's concert "Jazz for the Masses" at Carnegie Hall when Gensel announced that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated.
A pianist herself, Penelope often wishes she hadn't taken that unique jazz environment for granted and allowed herself to learn more.
Penelope attended myriad poetry readings during her years in NYC (1965-1970) and also participated in some. She came in contact with beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the Gansevoort Pier poets, attended readings at St. Mark's in the Bowery, took writing classes at Cooper Union and NYC from Bill Packard, as well as courses in Journalism, English and Philosophy at Brooklyn College. Penelope regards the daily living experiences of her years in NYC as a university education equivalency. She didn't formally attend university again until 1988, after her divorce from Jim Reedy.
College of Southern Idaho - AA 1991
Marquette University - BA 1993
Idaho State University - MA 1997
Upon graduating from ISU, Penelope worked as a reporter in the Burley, Idaho, Bureau for the Twin Falls Times-News where she covered police and court activities. From 1998 to 2003, she worked as a full-time reporter/editor for the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello, Idaho, and taught lower division English classes at ISU during evenings. In 2003, she was hired as a full-time English Instructor at ISU where she continues teaching.
While working for the Idaho State Journal, Penelope began writing an occasional column titled "My Private Pocatello" which she continues to write and publish to date.
Her poetry has appeared in the American Literary Review; Graining the Mare: The Poetry of Ranch Women, edited by Teresa Jordan; Idaho's Poetry: a Centennial Anthology, edited by Ron McFarland and William Studebaker. Chapbooks include: Coffee Royal (with Leslie Leek), Blue Scarab Press; and The Last Fairfield Rodeo, The Redneck Press.
from The Last Fairfield Rodeo, The Redneck Press. If I Left he'd sit at the bar and pout, while divorcees with big tits and dyed hair flock around him claiming, "All he needs is a good woman." And elderly neighbor ladies would bring casseroles and Jello salads and pat him on the back. If I left, the gals at the supermarket over coffee and a smoke would say they knew it would come to this ". . .her, with 'the big head and all.'" And if I stay, and one day draw a bead on his sweet bring with the .44, the men at the Club would say, "We knew she was crazy." And if I stay until he shoots me, catches me in the act of poetry, barricaded behind a wall of books, the Women's Auxiliary would say, "She drove him to it."