Narena's career has been varied, ranging from writing to teaching English, cattle breeding, magazine publishing and politics. She was for six years a district councillor and Chair of Planning Hearings for the Opotiki District Council as well as a member of the East Coast/Hawkes Bay Conservation Board. She has also been a member of the NZ National Council of Women's environment standing committee and is a member of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand.

Narena has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Classical Greek and a Masters degree in Teaching English as a Second Language from the University of Illinois in the United States where she lived for ten years. She also lived in the United Kingdom for five years. She is a New Zealander by birth, her ancestry being English, Irish, Scottish and Italian. Her ancestors on both the paternal and maternal side settled in New Zealand in the 1860s.

Since 2004, Jaclyn Kras and Dick Bos have done an enormous amount of work in reorganising and upgrading this web site. A special thanks is due to Dick who, while living in the Netherlands, initiated the changes.