Megan Dougherty

I grew up in and around Nashville, Tennessee until my parents uprooted me and forced me to live in Pennsylvania during my high school years. Once I recovered from that trauma, I attended St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. After graduating in 1991, I met David Dougherty and, following years of his desperate and relentless courtship, I finally agreed to marry him in 1996. I’m sure he’ll confirm that if you ask him. I only agreed to marry him under the condition that we would never, ever have children, not even if I started begging in some sort of hormonal, thirties-induced hysteria. In 2003, we welcomed our first daughter, Harper, and another daughter, Devon, arrived three years later.

After nearly 15 years in the optical industry, I broke free in the fall of 2004 when my best friend’s boyfriend’s dad hired me as the Assistant Editor for Inside Annapolis Magazine. It’s all about who you know. I spent five years in editorial bliss, doing everything from filing to layout and design, until the publication folded in 2009. I then served as Assistant Editor at Taste of the Bay Magazine for a little over a year.

I began teaching myself to quilt in the summer of 2008, during a time when I needed something to do with my hands other than wrangle toddlers and mark up articles with a red pen. I thought it might be fun to document my adventures with tangled thread and mismatched points on a blog, and thus The Bitchy Stitcher was born. Who knew so many people would be interested in reading me describe how much I suck at sewing? Now, several years later, I don’t suck nearly as much, but I do have a loyal group of readers who are constantly emailing me pictures of things that look like naughty body parts and saying, “This made me think of you.” Tugs at the ol’ heartstrings, it does.

The blog was a major turning point in my life because, though I had wanted to be a humor writer all my life, I never had the guts to put any of my humor writing out into the world. In 2009, on the advice of one of my readers, I submitted an article to Quilter’s Home Magazine. Not only did they accept it, but they also asked me to be their regular humor columnist—“they” being Jake Finch and Melissa Thompson Maher, the co-editors-in-chief. They also took advantage of my editorial experience and let me sit in on planning meetings, offer advice, copyedit, research and just be a general pain in the butt.

When Quilter’s Home came to its end, Jake and Melissa grabbed me by the hair and together we started Generation Q. I continued my column and also served as the magazine’s creative director, handling layout and design for the first 5 print issues. I did pretty good – I mean, nothing exploded and one died, so I consider that a rousing success.

But I knew that I wanted to strike out on my own and focus on my own projects, so in the spring of 2013, I stepped down as creative director, though I still get to keep an associate editor title and the key to the executive washroom since I still write my column and other stuff. Quilting Isn’t Funny is my first book.