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Local writer dies at age 44

By MARTA HEPLER DRAHOS
mdrahos@record-eagle.com



TRAVERSE CITY -- A local writer whose struggles with a paralyzing neurological condition and subsequent inability to work launched a fund-raising campaign to help save her home has died at the age of 44.

Lori Hall Steele died Wednesday in Howell, after a mystifying illness that was diagnosed as either Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease), a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord, or Lyme disease.

A self-employed single mother and prolific writer whose nearly 3,000 features, essays and news stories have appeared in print and online publications nationwide, Hall Steele lost feeling in her feet in 2007 and eventually became completely paralyzed. She had been unable to work since mid-March, prompting friends to mobilize to help pay her mortgage and medical bills, which topped $100,000.

Her plight and the chance to help resonated with writers, artists, musicians and other self-employed creative people both in the region and beyond, who raised about $70,000 through grants, a silent auction and an online campaign called savelorishouse.com.

Contributors included online writers groups, the American Society of Journalists and Authors and pop star Ben Lee.

A graduate of Michigan State University with a bachelor's degree in journalism, Hall Steele came to the area as a young reporter from the Albion Recorder. From 1989 through 1993 she was a reporter, columnist and editor at the Record-Eagle, where she covered the cherry industry among other beats.

Early in her career she contributed to a Record-Eagle series on poverty in the region that earned the paper a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award citation for distinguished reporting, alongside such news organizations as The Boston Globe, ABC News and National Public Radio. She also received awards from the Inland Daily Press and the Associated Press.

Former Record-Eagle City Editor Loraine Anderson recalls Hall Steele as a gifted and versatile writer who always searched for creative ways to get and tell a story, and whose sense of humor often showed up in her work.

"She was a great writer, a great researcher and also a really fine editor, and she always worked to tell the story through people," Anderson said. "She had that tenacity you have to have to be a hard news reporter and was very much concerned about First Amendment rights.

"She loved to write, and she loved this work," Anderson added.

Longtime friend Kristen Hains said Hall Steele was curious and passionate about her wide-ranging interests, from gardening to film to the area's history. She was instrumental in helping get the Traverse City Film Festival off the ground as a member of the festival's founding committee, and became a champion of the Grand Traverse Commons redevelopment project after co-writing "The Beauty of Therapy" with Earle Steele, grounds keeper at the former Traverse City State Hospital.

"She had a passion for everything she did, whether it was her writing, her son, her friends or a cause she got behind," Hains said. "If she put herself behind something she put herself behind it 100 percent. I think what made her so special as a writer also made her special as a person, and that is that Lori never stopped asking questions. And she was always looking forward, even when she was struck with this. She never stopped believing that if she acted independently and asked enough questions she could change the outcome."

Hall Steele was instrumental in calling attention to the historic Traverse City State Hospital and the efforts to preserve it as The Village at Grand Traverse Commons, said Mini Minervini of the preservation and redevelopment Minervini Group. And she involved others in writing about the project too.

"Lori has always been a passionate advocate for the preservation and renovation of Building 50 and the whole complex," Minervini said. "She paid attention to the details. And anything she wrote was always stellar."

After leaving the Record-Eagle, Hall Steele moved on to staff positions with Traverse Magazine and Northern Home and, farther afield, with the Prague Post. Most recently she was a freelance writer and editor who shepherded publications from conception to printing press, edited stories and books including Michael Moore's "Dude, Where's My Country?" and designed newspapers, magazines and books. She was the author of "Sweet and Snappy Cherry Drinks," a small-press selection of the Publishers Marketing Association.

As a freelance writer, she specialized in stories about the home, food, parenting, travel and the environment for publications ranging from the Detroit Free Press, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post to Brides, SmartMoney and Woman's Day. Shortly before she died, she learned that the national magazine Parenting was interested in buying one of her essays.

"It was such a sweet moment," said Hains, also a freelance writer. "I thought, 'You can take away her voice, you can take away her ability to walk, but you can't take away her ability to affect people with her thoughts.'"

Those thoughts reached a discriminating audience in June, when the prestigious Washington Post published one of Hall Steele's essays in which she explored her responsibility to her son, Jackson, 7. Although it was written before she became ill, it proved to be prophetic.

"I tell him I'll always be here for him, one way or another," she wrote. "Always always always. Just like my mother is here for me ... It is an impossible promise, a gamble with his trust. I secretly pray I don't let him down, not on this."

Funeral arrangements are pending.

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