ABOUT ANDREA ESCHEN
Discover how historical events shape our present through the writing of Andrea Eschen.
Andrea Eschen’s nonfiction writing examines how historical events, even small ones, shape the present.
She has published essays in a parenting anthology and the literary magazines Months to Years, All Your Stories, Spillwords, and Pembroke Magazine. The Chicago History Magazine published in summer 2025 an article about how the farmerettes, including her grandmother, during the Great War helped women win the right to vote. She’s a reader of nonfiction flash essays for Hippocampus Magazine.
She is writing a non-fiction book about the making of Chicago and the role of her great-grandfather, Victor Falkenau, in it. A renowned—and controversial—building contractor during Chicago’s architectural heyday at the turn of the 19th century, he left a lasting impact on the city as we know it today.
Her Substack “Building Modern Chicago” offers insights and interpretations she’s discovered about his role in the modernization of Chicago.
She writes weekly blogs for another Substack Snippets from Spain. She explores the historical and cultural meanings of day-to-day occurrences she comes across as a foreigner living in that country.
She moved to Madrid from Washington, D.C. with her husband to write, perfect her Spanish grammar, explore a new culture, and be close to big mountains.
She’s pretty much given up on learning to dance to Latin beats.
Prior to her writing career, she worked for three decades at international not-for-profit organizations that improved women’s reproductive health care and counseling in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
She traveled to over thirty countries to meet with nurses, doctors, social workers, and clients in hospitals and clinics to help women receive the services they needed. She, with her colleagues around the world, wrote proposals, reports, and communications to governments, foundations, and donors to improve the health of women, men, and adolescents.
Andrea grew up in northern California which explains her love for the outdoors, especially the mountains. She would spend most of her free time hiking if she could. After stopping out from the University of California/Davis at the end of her sophomore year, she camped out in her brother’s dorm room at Dartmouth College, until she rented a loft above the unheated mudroom at a nearby organic farm-commune.
Dartmouth professors and their spouses occupied the rest of the house. Not only did she learn organic gardening and farming chores and how to make maple syrup and pluck a chicken, she also read books on health and hunger in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Here in front of a woodstove on cold winter nights, she discovered her career path in international health and development.
She picked up academics again at Bates College in Maine. After graduation, she moved back to California and worked in a bookstore. She quit because customers were primarily interested in mass market thrillers, not literature. She got a job at Planned Parenthood. Subsequently, she attended New York University to get a master’s degree in public health. Hired by an international non-governmental organization that addressed women’s reproductive health, she had the good fortune of traveling all over the world, including to places that friends and family members had never heard of or wanted to visit.
After retiring, she has dedicated much of her time to writing personal essays and working on the book about her great-grandfather. She’s grateful to the members of her writing community and to the many instructors and mentors for providing insightful, thoughtful feedback and helping her sharpen her skills.
In the moments when Andrea is not writing or thinking about writing, she’s in the gym, exploring on foot the streets of Madrid, or hiking in a mountain range somewhere in the world. She also enjoys convening with family and friends and sitting in outdoor cafés in Spain watching people go by. She lives with her husband and has three magnificent children far flung across the United States.