A Community of Support: How Encouragement Led a CFP Employee to Write Her First Book

A Columbia Forest Products employee recently accomplished the exceptional: authorship. Under the pen name Ivy Accalia, one of our HR assistants wrote a book fueled by a love of the supernatural genre, a familial love of fantasy games and the encouragement of her fellow CFP employees.

Ivy remembers a time when she worked for a company that did not always seek to encourage her. She often recalls coworkers telling her that being a dyslexic, bilingual single mother would make it impossible to write the book she’d been envisioning for years. Then, a little over a year ago, she joined Columbia Forest Products as an HR assistant and saw firsthand how positive encouragement gives people the power to achieve success.

Ivy describes her interview for Columbia as “feeling like coming home to a place you never knew.” Right away, the work-life balance provided by Columbia allowed her time to work on her book, and she found the confidence to tell her coworkers about the progress. Many of them would give her polite nudges like: “When’s that book coming? I want to read it!” She also credits her supervisor with assuring her that anything she sought out to do, she could. 

With this newfound encouragement, Ivy committed to sitting down every day after work in front of the T.V. (the noise helped her concentrate) and writing. Although there was still a lot of writing to be done, she did commit to creating a book that had very little filler. As an avid reader, she wanted to create a book that was easy to follow and focused on the overall story rather than excessive descriptive elements. 

Once the book was complete and Ivy got through the process of self-publishing, she reflected and was adamant that she would not have finished the book at this time without the help of her coworkers. For that reason, she is generously donating 100% of launch sales and 10% of future sales to the Columbia Forest Products Foundation, which supports our employees and communities. On behalf of the Columbia Forest Products Foundation, we’d like to thank Ivy for her exceptional generosity.

Both inside and outside of work, we encourage all our employees to keep up the great work of lifting each other up! Be sure to support Ivy’s book and keep an eye out for an upcoming sequel!