She’s a best-selling author and hosts one of the world’s top parenting podcasts. She was name-checked by Donald Trump in the lead-up to the presidential election. And she’s a practicing pediatrician right here in Traverse City.

Dr. Meg Meeker might not be a household name to some, but she’s cultivated lots of notoriety since she published her first book in 2004. She writes from a conservative perspective about topics such as teen sex and parenting. Meeker has a new book coming out next month called Hero – Being the Strong Father Your Children Need.

In this week's Northern Express – sister publication of The Ticker – writer Patrick Sullivan sits down to talk to Meeker about how she traded her experience as a doctor to become a national figure. Excerpts from Meeker's in-depth Q&A include: 

> On writing on the dangers of teenage sex: "I never really set out to write or anything like that, but our girls were young in the ‘90s, late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and I just didn’t like the over-sexualization of kids that I was seeing in the media. You know, little kids. And I thought, this isn’t okay. Somebody’s got to speak out against that, that sex isn’t for kids and back off. So I just started to do a lot of medical research on what the dangers of it were. I said, 'Why isn’t anybody telling kids this?' And so that’s sort of morphed into a book, and that sort of threw me into the national spotlight, and I just kept on writing."

> On making national headlines for being name-checked by Donald Trump: "Here’s the thing: Nobody really put out my take. My take was this: I had a book, my Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters book, and we wrote a devotional, a Christian devotional, to accompany the book, and that came out in May of last year. And we were doing PR and I had written an article, and this is when the firestorm was going. And I was trying to say, regardless of what you say about Obama, or regardless of what you say about Trump, here’s the good things you can say. It appears to me that Obama was a very good dad. I think that. I don’t know the man. It appears to me that Trump was a good father, because regardless of what you think about him politically, he appears to be a good father...I was trying to pull it out of the political firestorm and just talk about something above it, but I really wasn’t allowed to go there."

Read the full interview in this week's Northern Express cover story, "The World According to Meeker." Check out the Northern Express online, or pick up a free copy at one of more than 600 distribution spots across 14 counties. And, stay connected throughout the week on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.