Fulfilling Occupation | Changing Course
Time for a new chapter In 2008, Todd Arkenberg exchanged a career as an airline executive for the solitary life of a novelist. Now living in Brussels and working on his third book, he has (almost) never looked back. TEXT MARIA FOLEY
Todd and Jim
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t’s not hard for Todd to pinpoint the beginning of his passion for writing. “I got the bug early, in grade school,” he says. “I loved the creative writing exercises, and had fun weaving stories.” But university creative writing programmes were few and far between in those days, so Todd satisfied his creative needs with a BA in English from Northwestern University. Then he opted for a completely different path. “An MBA in Finance and Accounting launched my business career and took me away from fiction writing,” he says. He joined United Airlines in 1986, and rose through the ranks at the Chicago headquarters until he became a VicePresident in 2006. Two years later, worn down by the relentless onslaught of rising fuel prices and neverending cost-cutting measures,
Global Connection | December 2014