Paula Arellano Geoffroy

I’ve always loved to write. At school I kept diaries and at university I filled notebooks with thoughts, stories, and even scenes of an imagined novel.

As a child, I attended an English school in Santiago until I turned eighteen and entered university. After university, I moved from Chile to Venezuela, and later from Venezuela to the Netherlands. I was living in Venezuela twenty years ago when I began studying creative writing at Escuela de Escritores, Madrid, and I was living in the Netherlands when I began studying professional writing and editing at the University of California, Berkeley. During all my travels, though, I never stopped writing and reading in English.

I studied forest engineering at Universidad de Chile. I fell in love with trees, forests, wildlife, ecosystems, and the environment of this beloved Earth, but I also discovered an intimate passion while working on my thesis: the excitement of researching and writing the manuscript. I even remember thinking how wonderful it would be to make a career out of writing.

Life is surprising, isn’t it? But perhaps not so surprising when you are clear about what you want. And I really wanted to write. I wanted to write well. In Spanish of course, but mostly in English, the language I’ve loved since my early days at school. So I studied, read, and wrote everyday for many years. Until I discovered I not only wanted to write, but also to help others communicate by editing their texts.

I created Happy Words as my digital home. The phrase is a satisfying expression to describe the outcome of my work; the website is the perfect place to show it. I do what I love and I love what I do.