Eric Hjerstedt Sharp begins career at Ojibwe Times

Eric Hjerstedt Sharp of Iron River is the new managing editor at the Ojibwe Times. Sharp will share a variety of duties with publisher and editor Joe Morey. He will also be contributing to the Lac du Flambeau Review.

Most recently a staff writer at the Reader Weekly in Duluth, he was also with the Ironwood (Mich.) Daily Globe, and The County Journal in Washburn. Sharp has been a reporter and editor at newspapers in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Colorado. He was also recently an online editor at BusinessNorth in Duluth, Minn.

A freelance writer for such publications as the Reader Weekly, the Rocky Mountain News, Bloomsbury Review, Perfect Duluth Day and others, he also blogs extensively and has written news releases for several area businesses. He has also edited and published five books for various authors, including his own book: Rune Tailings (Sharp Tongue Press, 1995). Besides his editorial duties at the Ojibwe Times, Sharp will be selling and designing advertising copy for both the print and online edition. He will also be involved with the publication’s new social network site: RezLoops.

A multi-generational native of Wisconsin on both sides of his family, his great-grandfather was a logging teamster and farmer in the Cable area. On his mother’s side, an ancestor moved to La Pointe in the 1830s, before Wisconsin was a state. His father is a retired Osteopathic physician and surgeon in Waterloo; while his mother raised, trained and showed Alaskan Malamutes and was for a while was an active real estate broker. She died in 2009 in Iron River.

While at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley where he was graduated from, Sharp played rugby, ski raced and worked for the college newspaper. Following a career as a ski instructor in Colorado, Montana as well as the Midwest, he began writing for newspapers and magazines. He graduated from A.D. Johnston High School in Bessemer, Mich. and got his first job as a ski instructor at nearby Big Powderhorn Mountain.

“It’s great to be working with Joe at the Ojibwe Times, and I am thrilled to be working in this beautiful area where I was brought up,” Sharp said. “I remember coming to Telemark when it was still a downhill ski area, before Indianhead opened, after which time my family skied there. I also remember coming to Turtle-Flambeau Flowage as a Boy Scout, and some of my best memories are of exploring the lake country there and nearby at the family cabin on Pine Lake in Oma.”

In 2008, Sharp enrolled in a graduate-level online class at Harvard University Extension School after receiving a scholarship from Eli Lilly and Company. He hopes to someday continue in the graduate school while researching the side of his family that settled in Massachusetts in the 1600s and later moved to Wisconsin. Most of all, he said, he likes writing about the people and places of the North.

“Everyone has a story to tell. I have never lived in such a diverse and interesting place,” he said.