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The Pres Says: ESWA Runs on Volunteer Power Welcome to the 2000-2001 program
year of Eastside Writers. We’ve
been working over the summer to make this a fun and productive year for us all
and we hope that you’ll join with us in making the most of it.
There are a number of changes since last year, so I thought that I’d
take the time to discuss them now. The first change is that we’ve already scheduled the speakers for most of year. The meeting calendar, speaker biography notes, and topic descriptions are available on the ESWA web site and are being published in the September newsletter as well. Speakers’ topics include cutting-edge Internet topics, writing craft, writer’s life, and even a singer-songwriter who will perform a concert the weekend before she speaks at our November meeting. A number of our speakers hail from
other local writers’ organizations including genre specific groups in
children’s writing, romance, mystery, playwrighting, and Christian writing.
As I sought to engage the speakers, I contacted a number of these
organizations. In all cases, I’ve
encouraged speakers and organizers to spread the word about ESWA and to invite
their members to be our guests. For
information about these and other local writers’ groups click on the “NW
Writers Groups” link on the ESWA web site. The ESWA web site has continued to
evolve over the summer. In addition
to the creation of the NW Writers Groups page and the new Calendar section,
we’ve been sorting out the Resources and Links pages. The Resources page now has links to all of the major writing
education programs in the area in addition to the speaking forums that were
there. The NW Writers Groups page
has information about local groups affiliated with larger national groups and an
initial list of smaller writers groups that meet in bookstores and libraries in
the area. This is a field where all
members can contribute to the information resources of the group.
Please email any board member information about any groups of which you
are aware and we’ll add them to the listing.
The Links page is another where your contributions are needed.
If you have a favorite site, forward the link to any board member along
with a sentence or two describing the site, and we’ll add it to our Links
page. The work described above represents
the board’s vision of what ESWA should be. Clearly, that alone cannot sustain the organization.
The ESWA board needs your input, your energy, even a little of your work
to make the organization beneficial to all the members.
So, what do you want ESWA to be? What
else can the organization do to be productive for you?
What do you have to share that will be useful for the other members?
This is your organization; please, let us know what you’re thinking.
You will notice that the September newsletter has a survey insert
regarding your interests for the group. Please
take the time to fill out the survey and return it to the board by mail to the
ESWA address, or better yet bring it in person to the September meeting. Along similar lines, traditionally
ESWA has had an annual writing contest. Last
year’s contest drew a small number of submissions and lacked the support of
the membership to provide evaluators. If we are going to continue to have a writing contest
sponsored by ESWA, then we need to reverse these trends.
The contest can be another important benefit of the group, but we need
your support to do it. Contact a
board member ASAP to indicate your availability to work on the writing contest. In keeping with the theme of
volunteerism in our organization, we’d like to advertise the availability of a
number of volunteer positions that need to be filled both on the board and
elsewhere. Open board positions
include:
Other, non-board volunteer positions are also open,
including:
Please consider volunteering for one of these positions,
helping the organization as well as yourself, and adding to your writing resume
as you do. On final plea: ESWA operates as a
nonprofit organization based solely on the membership fees of the group.
Those fees are used to pay the rent on the meeting hall, the honoraria
for the speakers, and the costs of producing and mailing this newsletter.
Your timely membership renewal will greatly facilitate the smooth
operation of the group. Thanks. “Volunteers need both selfish and selfless motives to
sustain their interest” —Natalie de Combray The
Pres Says: Try the Power We
should all flinch at my use of the word “networking” in this way.
Network, naturally, is a noun, but through the misconduct of American pop
business culture has become de facto a verb.
I apologize in advance for using this sort of mutation of the language,
but cannot find a suitable substitute. If
you have a single legitimate word that captures the same meaning as
“networking,” please send it to me. We’ve
all heard the adage, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”
How many of us stop to think about what it implies for us as writers?
Let me illustrate. During
some my research on my long-term biography project, I discovered that my subject
(Adolphe Danziger)
had used the better known horror writer H. P. Lovecraft as a ghostwriter in the
early 1920’s. Two of the
ghostwritten stories had been published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales
and had recently been republished in an
anthology of similar works that had all been ghostwritten or heavily edited
by Lovecraft. The book had a
forward by S.T. Joshi, of whom I had not heard, but clearly needed to
communicate to determine if he knew more about Danziger.
I wrote to the publisher, who forwarded my letter to Joshi, who in turn
wrote to me. Thus began a long
correspondence trading information about the interactions between Danziger and
Lovecraft. Through Joshi, I found
many more letters and references that gave wonderfully insightful details about
Danziger. In return I was able to
tell Joshi a few things that he didn’t already know.
As he was publishing a comprehensive biography
of Lovecraft, he asked me to edit a couple of pages of his manuscript –
and I garnered an acknowledgement in the book.
Finally Joshi asked me to write an article for the journal which he edits
called Lovecraft Studies, resulting in another
publication for me in the field of historical biographies. What’s
my point? Reaching out and
contacting other writers is critical to each of our success as writers.
It can provide leads to information you might not have found otherwise,
present publication opportunities, or simply give you somebody to talk or email
with that shares an interest. And
why am I making this point here? ESWA
provides the opportunity to network with fellow writers at each meeting.
In the half hour prior to the beginning of the official meeting, the room
is open, the coffee hot, and the cookies waiting for all of us to get together
and network. This is an
incredibly valuable resource – take advantage of it! On
a somewhat less cheery note, we received very few offers for volunteer help for
the organization. Especially
critically, we were unable to secure either a contest coordinator or a
sufficient number of contest reviewers. Thus,
it is with some regret that we must announce the discontinuation of the annual
writing contest for ESWA members. We
will be removing the information about the contest from the ESWA web site and
from future versions of our flier. We
similarly received no offers for volunteer help for gathering information to
distribute at the meetings or post to the web site.
So, while we have a backlog of useful information that we can present at
the next few meetings, you might find that the number of news items, conference
listings, etc. will dwindle if we don’t receive input from the membership. It’s
not too late to send in or bring your member survey.
We can still use the information and would like to incorporate your
interests into the meetings and other resources.
The surveys we have to date are relatively positive indicating that the
meetings, speakers, news items and events information are all useful.
Most respondents also supported having the annual writing contest, but
unfortunately failed to volunteer to facilitate it.
We received a similar outcome with respect to critique groups which,
given the lack of volunteers, will need to be arranged individually.
Most respondents had not heard of the ESWA web site and so could not
comment on its features. However,
we have received a number of emails from outside the group with very positive
comments. We did receive
information that the previous ESWA site was still live and have since been able
to contact the owner and get him to remove the old content from his site.
Thanks to the members that brought this to our attention! Pres
Says: Experience the World of Folk Songwriting Those of us that are old enough
should remember the folk music movement of the early sixties in which the music
was typically played on acoustic folk instruments and the songs were more poetic
or had more socially conscious lyrics than the other pop music of the era.
This wasn’t, of course, the first popular movement of folk music, but
it is the first that I personally remember.
I remember listening to my parents records of such artists as the
Limelighters, the Brothers Four, the Kingston Trio, and Joan Baez.
At my parents’ parties one of their friends would bring her guitar and
sing in our living room, or accompany my father or one of his friends with a
“walking guitar” style as they told stories or recited Robert Service poems
(“There are strange things done, in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for
gold…”).
My parents took me, at the age of 10 or 11, to a Joan Baez concert and I
heard live all of the songs I had heard from her records over the previous
decade.
I remember that she performed “Amazing Grace” a cappella and her
voice completely filled a 2000 seat auditorium, holding the audience rapt, and
it gave me goose bumps. The seventies brought us artists in
the same vein like Hoyt Axton, John Stewart and even John Denver who moved this
type of performing into the mainstream. Then
disco came and the thread of folk singer-songwriters was broken. I next became aware of the folk
singing in the early nineties. Then,
the movement was making a resurgence in New England in local coffeehouses,
churches and small community halls. Artists
like Cosy Sheridan, TR Ritchie, Dar Williams and Anne Weiss, our November
speaker, have all been part of this rebirth. I saw Cosy and TR in a small basement concert hall under the
Concord Inn restaurant in Massachusetts and immediately bought the CD she was
selling out of a small suitcase during the intermission.
The movement has built throughout the nineties and has blossomed into a
significant undercurrent in the music industry.
Now, the Seattle Folklore Society has hundreds of members and hosts five
to ten concerts a month in several regular venues throughout Seattle.
Despite this, the artists themselves can lead lifestyles not unlike
roving minstrels of yore, driving themselves cross-country from city to city,
performing in coffeehouses, pubs, church basements and people’s homes.
Like the rest of us writers, they may have other jobs to pay the bills
while they do what they must and what they love in between. A couple of years ago, I had
planned a weekend trip to Portland to see Cosy perform in a coffeehouse concert.
When we arrived, the cafe was defunct and the concert seemed to have
disappeared. A quick trip to Kinkos for access to the Internet (I’m
foreshadowing next month’s topic just a bit) and we found that since the café
was no longer in business, Cosy had rescheduled the performance as a “house
concert” in a nearby town. We
discovered that this meant she would be performing in somebody’s home with the
audience sitting around on couches and chairs, gnoshing chips and pretzels and
cider with the host, and talking with the artist at intermission. This took me back to the sixties, and my parents’ living
room.. “Ah,” I thought, “this is the way music is meant to be performed
– up close and personal, visceral in its nearness and tangibility!” Cosy and TR’s concert that night was even more enjoyable
than the times we’d seen them in Massachusetts and by the end of the evening
we’d volunteered to host a house concert ourselves, the next time either of
them made it to the Seattle area. That was three house concerts ago.
Anne Weiss’s concert this November will be our fourth, and our second
with Anne. Each of the times
before, we seemed to stay up into the wee hours after enjoying the concerts,
sitting around the kitchen table and talking about lyrics and songwriting and
the social issues and stories behind the songs.
It would be difficult to host the entire ESWA in this way (my kitchen
table just isn’t that big), so we’ve arranged a two-part event instead.
After the house concert Sunday evening, Anne will speak at the regular
ESWA meeting about storytelling in poetry and lyrics.
In addition to her songwriting, she’s taught creative writing at
Portland Community College and has published one volume of poetry.
It won’t quite be the same as sitting around my kitchen until all hours
of the morning, but it should be a fascinating and informative talk nonetheless. So, please take advantage of this
unique opportunity to enjoy both the experience of contemporary folk singing and
a peak behind the scenes of storytelling in songwriting.
And don’t be surprised if you find yourself buying one of Anne’s
CD’s out of her suitcase at the intermission. Pres
Says: Nothing No "Pres Says" column was published in the December newsletter. I explained as follows during the December meeting. I experience two complete systems failures in the week of Thanksgiving and the week after. In the first failure, my work laptop, which had been making strange noises and performing poorly for weeks reached the point where it would crash and "blue-screen" after about 15 minutes. I had the PC technician at work do an operating system repair and the system seemed to recover. The following week it died again with the same symptoms. This wouldn't have been too scary if my backup system hadn't failed utterly to boot the following day. The PC technician said that there was nothing he could do for the backup system, indicating that it was old enough to be only fit for the PC Recycle bin. I spent the next couple of days rebooting the laptop as required every 15-20 minutes to slowly copy all of my current files to another, safer location. In the end I recovered all of my writing files but lost the better part of two weeks, hence I missed the deadline for the newsletter. My admonition for all writers is that a backup system is insufficient and that everybody should make multiple backups to removable media. The Pres Says: Explore Publishing Alternatives Our December speaker, Michael
Calligaro discussed a number of avenues for self-publishing today that were not
available even a few years ago. In
addition to the ones he discussed, I’ve run into one other emerging
publication process this year that has similar characteristics. These new publishing methods give authors a chance to publish
or get published outside the monolithic mainstream publishing business, allowing
them to reach audiences who are looking for alternatives to mainstream books.
The processes all leverage new computing technologies to reduce costs and
provide the author with significantly greater control over the publication and
distribution of their books. Michael first used web and email
technology to distribute his work. As
part of his personal campaign to establish himself as a credited science fiction
writer, Michael wrote 20-30 short stories. He distributed these stories for free in an email newsletter,
called MystiNews, to a list of email subscribers over the Internet.
He invited his readers to forward the newsletter or stories freely as
long as they left his name intact, then invited all recipients to subscribe if
they wanted to get the regular newsletter.
MystiKeep, his web site,
contains archives of all of these short stories.
Michael’s next project cleverly built on this readership with a serial
he called The Daily Dose. Distributed
daily, each installment provided only a few hundred words, moving the story
along and leaving the reader with a small cliffhanger.
The serial last a year and a half, resulting in a complete story longer
than a typical first novel. Michael
used these media to distribute his work for free. In his view this was his investment in building a readership
and his craft. His capital
investment in this process was minimal – you can set up a web site for roughly
$40 per month, and sometimes less. This
level of investment doesn’t allow collecting money from readers in any sort of
foolproof manner, so it would be difficult to make this a paying proposition
without spending more. Michael has converted the stories
from Mystikeep into another format for readers of the web site - all of
the short stories now available in eBook (MS Reader) format.
This format allows Michael’s readers to download the stories into their
PocketPC and take the stories wherever they want to read them, rather than
requiring them to sit in front of their PC to read.
He demonstrated this technology with his own PocketPC, showing us that
the results are surprisingly readable. While
the current cost of a PocketPC is prohibitive ($400-500), Michael predicts that
a generation from now these devices will be as cheap as cell phones are now and
as widely used. When that happens,
he expects that children that are in school now will expect to use a device like
that to read, rather than expecting to read a book.
The cost of distribution of eBooks is minimal when compared to physical
books, and none of the costs are wasted. Michael
anticipates that his will completely transform the publishing industry in the
next decade, forcing the major publishers to change to keep up with these
technologies or leaving them behind. Having established a readership and
a method for communicating directly to them, Michael was ready for the next step
in his publication plan. He
published his first novel using new print-on-demand technology.
Services like Xlibris and iUniverse,
use laser printing technology to create custom small print runs of books.
These services can give the author complete control over the rights for
and content of their books and provides a relatively low-cost method of
self-publishing books. For example with Xlibris, books can be produced by this
method a few hundred at a time and cost the author in the neighborhood of $4 per
copy. Of course this just gets the
books printed, and leaves it to the author to distribute and market the book.
One relatively simple method to achieve both objectives is to sell the
books through amazon.com. Amazon takes a steep cut of 55% of the cover price, but gives
you worldwide marketing and distribution through the web. In addition to the self-publishing
possibilities of new technology, small presses are springing up throughout the
web. While the number of these
publishers makes it daunting to determine which might be legitimate, it is
possible. Some of these publishers
are making significant niches for themselves and establishing reputations for
quality work. For example, Starlight
Writer Publications is a small press specializing in a number of fiction
genres including romance and fantasy. This
press provides authors with a professional publication process resulting in
novels being distributed on CDs for use on computers, in eBook format for
download, and in print format in small press runs.
Starlight does minimal marketing of the books outside of the web, but
provides the entire technical infrastructure required to support getting paid
for electronic format publication of books. Michael’s perspective on these
new publishing technologies is that they are both a blessing and a curse.
For writers such as himself, they present opportunities to publish at a
relatively low cost while still having some of the benefits of worldwide
exposure. The downside for both
readers and writers is that this precipitates a deluge of junk writing and no
easy way of sifting the good from the bad.
Thus while the techniques Michael describes can allow us to get past the
publication and distribution hurdles, we still must market, market,
MARKET to help our books sell. Pres
Says: Get Your Thoughts Organized! Before I get to my intended topics, I must first call your
attention to the dire financial straits in which ESWA finds itself.
If it were not for significant cash contributions by individual board
members, ESWA would have failed financially twice this fall.
Having stretched our individual budgets as much as possible, it now time
to ask the membership to make a couple of decisions.
Do we want ESWA to continue? If
so, then are we willing to help it survive financially?
At $17 per year, ESWA is a stone bargain. Personally, I think it would still be a bargain at $25 or $30
per year, which is why I have contributed substantially to ESWA and applied for
matching funds from my workplace. If
you agree, please come to the next meeting prepared to contribute the difference
between what you’ve paid already and what you think the organization is worth.
If you disagree, please be prepared for ESWA to cease functioning.
If anybody is interested, we can spend some time discussing the details
of club finances at or after the meeting. As I look back at the year 2000, I
find it interesting how my writing focus has changed. In 1999, my primary focus was my extended work on a biography
of an obscure 19th-century Polish Jew who immigrated to America to
seek his fortune and how me met misfortune instead.
Then in 2000, I spent much of the year following local Olympic sailors
and working on a non-fiction book proposal on a sailing book for middle readers
(roughly ages 9-12). While the
sudden change may seem a mystery even to me at times, it flows, from a plot
perspective, if you have all the pieces of the story. My 11-year-old son is an avid
reader – he dusted all 780-odd pages of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
in just under two days. When he was
younger, one of his favorite series of books after The Chronicles of Narnia, Lloyd
Alexander’s Taran books, and the Animorphs series, was
the Norby the Robot books written by Janet Asimov, wife of the late
science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. At
one point where he had read all of the ten or so Norby books, he asked me if,
since I was a writer, couldn’t I write him another Norby book.
The idea was quite intriguing and so I set about determining what makes
up each of the Norby books, analyzing them for “factual” details,
characters, grade-level vocabulary and story structure.
As I started to limn out ideas for a Norby novel, it occurred to me that
I couldn’t just write to Janet Asimov and say, “Here’s the next novel in
your Norby series, would you like to read it?”
Clearly I needed to establish a reputation publishing, especially for the
young adult or middle reader audience. This
lead me to consider areas in which I had experience and could try publication
based on that, but with a different age focus than my other work, which lead in
turn to writing about sailing – one of my lifelong pursuits.
A trip to the library uncovered the fact that Charlie and Jonathan McKee,
two Olympic sailors, lived in Seattle, giving me a starting point for my work in
this area. For the first half of
the year, I followed their campaign toward the 2000 Sydney Olympics and wrote a
number of articles about them. In
the middle of the year I connected these two writing threads in a book proposal
for an illustrated middle reader book on the McKees’ style of Olympic sailing.
In the last part of the year, I worked on rewriting one of the first
pieces of autobiographical writing I ever did – again about sailing – as a
young adult novel. All of this by
way of indicating why I was especially interested in getting Sue Ford, our
January speaker, to speak to ESWA about writing for children.
I expect to use the information she gave us about capturing kids’
perspectives and the typical features of current children’s fiction as I
continue working on my YA novel. In a random, seemingly unrelated note, you might want to
check out the radio show “Write On!” on KSER 90.7 FM, Monday February 12th
at 4:30pm. “Write On” is a
radio show for writers broadcast on the 2nd Monday of each month. This month’s show will be on the subject of parent-writers
and will feature ESWA’s own Sherry Anderson (of Writers with Wrigglers fame)
and yours truly (of little if any fame if you don’t count the time that I…
But I digress.). This turns out to be the third
draft of “Pres Says” for February. Our
financial woes moved me from the first to the second draft.
But the second draft had the description of the wrong upcoming speaker
(March speaker Valerie Wilcox instead of the February speaker).
Clearly, I’m in need of getting my thoughts more organized.
Who better to help with that than our February speaker, Colleen Foye
Bollen, who will be giving her talk, “Don’t Sweat It, Organize It” at the
meeting? Not only that, but she’s
the host of the radio show “Write On!”
You’d think that we planned it that way. Pres
Says: It’s A Mystery to Me or Get Your Thoughts Organized! First, I wish to thank the members
present at the last meeting for their generous support of the association and of
getting a quick resolution to our financial woes. Members contributed over $300 at the meeting, getting us out
of immediate danger of collapse and giving us time to work on better long-term
solutions. Members agreed
unanimously to raise the dues after 7 years without an increase. Dues have been set at $25, the sole dissention in the members
on that amount actually wanted it to be substantially higher.
By the way, those of you that gave me cash need to identify yourselves to
Tim or me at the next meeting so we can credit you with the increased membership
fee. Those who paid by check have
already been so credited. That’s
the good news. Members also agreed that
investigating alternative locations for the meeting would be a good idea.
Jenna Kay Francis investigated Bellevue City Hall as well as several
other locations in the I-90/I-405 area. City
Hall turns out to be unavailable on the night we hold our meetings and would
require a change of day-of-the-week to pursue.
Other locations had charges not unlike what we have at the church in
Kirkland and thus provided no benefit. So,
that’s the bad news – for the moment, our expenses remain fixed – and for
now we’re still at the usual location. The untimely failure of my email
system’s connection to the Internet in late January led to an unfortunate
situation. Having realized in the
middle of the night that I’d switched our February and March speakers, I sent
a retraction of my column that never reached James. The column was printed, leaving me with egg on my face and
the need to explain at the meeting why it was not Colleen Foye Bollen.
Ok, I really mean it this time – Valerie spoke in February, Colleen
will speak in March. I wrote in my last column about the
chain of events that lead to me writing for young adults.
It was a similar, Connections-style chain of events that lead me
to invite our February speaker, mystery writer Valerie Wilcox.
During last summer, while I was working on the speaker calendar, I asked
the board for ideas and suggestions. Tim
recommended a particular local mystery writer.
Using my favorite research tool, I cruised the web trying to track this
writer down, finding her books on Amazon.com, but finding no other references to
her. I did, however, find the
Northwest Mystery Authors web page; part of the Northwest Crime Scene site
(http://www.nwlink.com/~massucco/crime-scene.html), and through it found a long
list of local mystery writers and their email addresses.
Naturally, when one of those mystery writers was a woman whose stories
include a protagonist who teaches sailing at a local marina, I couldn’t resist
inviting her to speak. It was not nearly so mysterious how
I found our real March speaker and it again involved the Internet.
Last summer I was searching the web and found the site associated with
Colleen’s radio show “Write On!” It
sounded so interesting that I emailed to see if she’d be interested in talking
to us – simple really. She’ll
be talking about a technique for “Getting Your Thoughts Organized.”
Cleary, after last month’s column faux pas, I could really use
it. Pres Says: Don't Quack Up, Try Webbing your Feat! Just for sport, I tried with the title, and perhaps even with this sentence, although I'm not really sure I've succeeded, to see how many writing atrocities I could commit in a single sentence. One instance of turning a noun into a verb, embedded parenthetical phrases, and multiple puns seems like a reasonably good effort for so few words. Perhaps as a writing exercise, each of you could prepare some of your own and bring them to the meeting to share. Think of this as a warm-up for the famed Bulwer-Lytton Contest ("It was a dark and stormy night..."). Although the title might be a reference to our March speaker's process for mind mapping, which she called "webbing," the intent of the title, beyond the feeble attempt at humor, is to advocate the use of the worldwide web as both a place to publish and to advertise. I keep my personal site as a rather extended writing resume and it garners a modicum of traffic. I also keep the site for ESWA which attracts some visitors and provides sufficient visibility for the group that I get a steady trickle of email traffic with announcements of interest to writers, the infrequent offer for free stuff (like magazine samples), and the occasional new member. Virtually all of the speakers we've had this year have some web presence and for some it is a central focus of their writing and publishing. You may recall that our February speaker, Valerie Wilcox spoke about doing her own research for her murder mysteries by direct interviews with subject matter experts, even if they're not specifically interested in writers, as possible speakers. And, as if purposefully foreshadowing our next speaker, somebody suggested that we try to leverage our own membership for possible speakers. In addition to all the things on the front page of this newsletter, Jeanetta Chrystie is a member of the group, attending when her teaching at Lake Washington doesn't conflict. In keeping with my theme of "webbing," Jeanetta will be talking about the kinds of resources and opportunities available for writers online. Oh, and speaking of opportunities on the web, and of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest (and we were of course), the context deadline is April 15th. For more information check out the Contest web site and happy webbing! Pres
Says: ESWA Still Runs on Volunteer Power (Barely) The May meeting will conclude
the 2000-2001 program year of Eastside Writers.
The year has had its ups and downs.
We’ve survived the year and are none worse for the wear.
The group still lacks staying power and strength beyond what the few
officers provide and without the board it is unclear the group would continue. On the plus side, we’ve had a number of successes. The speaker calendar was completed prior to the beginning of the year so speaker publicity was assured well in advance of each meeting. Speakers’ topics included cutting-edge Internet topics, writing craft, writer’s life, and even a singer-songwriter who performed a concert the weekend before she spoke at our November meeting. A number of our speakers hailed from other local writers’ organizations including genre specific groups in children’s writing, romance, mystery, and Christian writing. As I sought to engage the speakers, I contacted a number of these organizations. In all cases, I’ve encouraged speakers and organizers to spread the word about ESWA and to invite their members to be our guests. In addition, the ESWA web site was resurrected from its former moribund state, and has been updated regularly throughout the year. The site has provided a focus for the worldwide writers’ community to contact ESWA, netting us some interesting emails, publishing opportunities and new members. The meeting calendar, speaker biography notes, and topic descriptions are available on the ESWA web site. We’ve also completed a successful transition of the editorship of this newsletter and have recruited a new hospitality chair to provide coffee for the meetings. The work described above represents
the board’s vision of what ESWA should be and their effort.
Clearly, that alone cannot sustain the organization.
We narrowly averted the group’s demise due to insufficient funds this
year – a demonstration of how fragile the organization is.
The ESWA board needs your input, your energy, even a little of your work
to make the organization beneficial to all the members.
So, what do you want ESWA to be?
What else can the organization do to be productive for you?
What do you have to share that will be useful for the other members?
This is your organization; please, let us know what you’re thinking and
pitch in to help carry on the group. Traditionally ESWA has had an
annual writing contest.
This year we were unable to hold a contest because we lacked a vice
president and sufficient volunteers to do the work.
We still do not have a vice president and cannot expect to be able to
hold a contest in the fall.
So, at present we have a number of open positions on the board and
elsewhere.
Open board positions include:
Other, non-board volunteer positions are also open,
including:
Please consider volunteering for one of these positions,
helping the organization as well as yourself, and adding to your writing resume
as you do. One final plea: The treasurer
position is critical to the organization.
Without it we can’t pay our bills and we can’t meet.
Tim has done this work for a long time and needs to move on.
We need to thank him and have somebody step up as his replacement. Thanks and see you next fall (or at
PNWC this summer)! Pres
Says: Rejoice in Diversity Welcome to the 2001-2002
program year of Eastside Writers.
We’ve been working over the summer to make this a fun and productive
year for us all and we hope that you’ll join with us in making the most of it.
As a writer, I consider exposing myself to the diversity of the world as very important. Absorbing different speech patterns, vocabulary, cultural customs and points of view are critical to understanding and writing about my characters, giving life and vitality to my stories, and accurately reflecting the real world in what I write. My workplace feeds this need as it is quite diverse and has afforded me the opportunity to talk with people about interesting topics like singing Christian hymns in Korean, the difference between Traditional and Simplified Chinese, why a woman from India might have an Anglo man’s first name as her maiden name, whether or not Quebec should declare independence, and when to use “de nada” vs. “no hay de qué” as “thank you” in Spanish. Beyond this, the company I work for has built an internal program to build our focus and understanding of the value of diversity in the workplace. I consider this a bounty of support for my writing habit. However, if you are like me, the history you were taught in elementary school began with Columbus “discovering” America, focusing first on the Great Age of Exploration by colonizing European powers. Despite recent efforts to update education practices to present a more balanced and multicultural version of this part of history and its effects on indigenous peoples, most history texts still have a European perspective and rarely include much of history prior to Columbus. It is as though our exploration of the world began in 1492. For me as a writer, I feel obliged to help modify this misperception through my writing. I am currently working on a book proposal on world exploration prior to Columbus and the “Great Age of Exploration” taking a multicultural view and looking beyond our traditional, Europe-centric presentation of world history. I also plan to take advantage of the diversity program at work to give me an audience with whom I can discuss my writing. Based on my own writing interests, as well as feedback from the membership last year, I have attempted to make the speaker calendar for this year more diverse than it was in previous years. We will have speakers representing different “cultures” including fiction writers, nonfiction writers, a historian, a publisher’s editor, a bookseller, and others. Speakers’ topics for this year include in-depth workshops on writing scenes, subtext, and plotting; how to build your acting skills to improve readings; understanding the small press publication process; and more. As always, we welcome feedback on the speakers and encourage our members to provide suggestions for possible future speakers. In keeping with the theme of
diversity in our programs, we’d like to advertise the availability of a wide
variety of volunteer positions that need to be filled both on the board and
elsewhere.
Open board positions include:
Other, non-board volunteer positions are also open,
including:
Please consider volunteering
for one of these positions, helping the organization as well as yourself, and
adding to your writing resume as you do. On final plea: ESWA operates as a
nonprofit organization based solely on the membership fees of the group.
Those fees are used to pay the rent on the meeting hall, the honoraria
for the speakers, and the costs of producing and mailing this newsletter.
Your timely membership renewal will greatly facilitate the smooth
operation of the group. Thanks. Pres
Says: Consider the Power of Words in the News Media It is no secret that the words we choose have significant power over our readers. If each of us in ESWA described a single event or person, our readers would get very different pictures depending on the words that each of us chose. Clearly this holds for the news media as well. We naively assume that the media take an even hand in describing events and people, offering either neutral description or presenting multiple, balancing perspectives. Yet, increasingly it seems, the mainstream media present news colored to reinforce popular opinion and uphold the current political establishment. People and events about which the media want the readers to feel positively about are portrayed with words that convey warmth, strength and a sense of rightness. Conversely people and events are portrayed with more neutral words or words conveying coldness, weakness or a sense of wrongness when the intent is to portray them negatively. Often, events that are similar in their basic nature are portrayed in opposite fashion depending whom those events effect. I must warn the reader that the examples I have, taken from recent media coverage, may make you uncomfortable and you may disagree with them strongly. I won’t apologize if they do make you uncomfortable, as they make me uneasy as well. I think that we should be uncomfortable. I think that is the only way it can possibly change. If the President consults “former cabinet members” we accept them as experts and believe their advice to be valuable. If instead, we were to characterize those people as “on the payroll of defense contractors” we might suspect that they would have a vested interest in promoting defense industry interests. Despite this, when the current administration consulted with people for which both descriptions apply; only the first was used by the mainstream media. Thus, by describing people using their past, presumably esteemed positions and omitting their current possible conflicts of interest, the media support the conclusions drawn without questioning whether those conclusions are well-founded or based in self-interest. The power of images in the media can be used as powerfully as we ascribe our own words based on how those images are presented. When we see images in the media of citizens on the street waving their nation’s flag and shouting slogans against another country by which they feel wronged, we see them portrayed in two ways. If those shouting citizens are Americans, we understand their slogans, and they are portrayed as patriotic and righteous. If those shouting citizens are Arabs, we don’t understand their slogans or their views, and they are portrayed as unreasoning, nationalistic and wrong-headed. In both cases we accept the images at an emotional level and dig no further to see if the views represented by those slogan are justified or not. These examples are but two of many. I encourage all of us to read more thoroughly, to look for where words are being used to influence us, and to consider deeply whether or not we want those views to be given to us by a media with an unpublished agenda. Now, on a lighter note, and with a
published and open agenda, we’d like to advertise again the availability of a
wide variety of volunteer positions that need to be filled both on the board and
elsewhere.
The agenda is simple.
ESWA works on volunteer power.
The more of us that get involved, the better it will be.
Open board positions include:
Other, non-board volunteer positions are also open,
including:
Please consider volunteering for one of these positions,
helping the organization as well as yourself, and adding to your writing resume
as you do. On final plea: ESWA operates as a nonprofit organization based solely on the membership fees of the group. Those fees are used to pay the rent on the meeting hall, the honoraria for the speakers, and the costs of producing and mailing this newsletter. Your timely membership renewal will greatly facilitate the smooth operation of the group. Thanks.
Pres
Says: Don’t look now, but we’re broke! As
much as I might like to talk about some fun and interesting writing topic, I
must instead call your attention to the dire financial straits in which ESWA
finds itself.
If it were not for significant cash contributions by individual board
members, ESWA would have failed financially this fall.
Having stretched our individual budgets as much as possible, it is now
time to ask the membership to make a couple of decisions.
Do we want ESWA to continue?
If so, then are we willing to help it survive financially?
At $25 per year, ESWA is still a stone bargain.
Personally, I think it would still be a bargain at $35 or $40 per year,
which is why I have contributed substantially to ESWA and applied for matching
funds from my workplace.
If you agree, please come to the next meeting prepared to contribute the
difference between what you’ve paid already and what you think the
organization is worth.
If you disagree, please be prepared for ESWA to cease functioning.
If anybody is interested, we can spend some time discussing the details
of club finances at or after the meeting. Members previously agreed that investigating alternative
locations for the meeting would be a good idea.
Jenna Kay Francis investigated Bellevue City Hall as well as several
other locations in the I-90/I-405 area.
City Hall turns out to be unavailable on the night we hold our meetings
and would require a change of day-of-the-week to pursue.
Other locations had charges not unlike what we have at the church in
Kirkland and thus provided no benefit.
So, we need to dig deeper to try to find a suitable, lower-cost location. Finally, you’ll notice that the newsletter has adopted a
smaller format.
In doing so, we’re recognizing that we can neither afford, nor were
making especially good use of the larger format.
If at some point in the future we have both the financial health and
prospective contributors to the newsletter in sufficient numbers, then we return
to the larger format. Pres
Says: Write with a Purpose. I
wrote earlier in the year about the diversity work that I’ve begun doing both
at work and in my writing.
I believe that the subject will be a major theme in every else I ever
write.
In the Sunday, December 2nd Seattle Times there was a full-page article
called “Torn from the Land” by Todd Lewan and Dolores Barclay of the
Associated Press.
It was the first of a three-part series about how time after time land
was been taken from African Americans in the US over a span of more than 100
years beginning just before the Civil War.
The article not only brings to light another episode of American history
that desperately needs to be told but also serves as a reminder of how much we
take for granted in our daily lives.
We assume that we’re all equal and we assume that we can all succeed in
the present if we put our minds to it.
But I think that our history, if we are willing to look at it
unabashedly, tells us a different story and, if we listen carefully, calls us to
action as writers.
More writers need to produce articles like the one. There
are many ways to write with a clear sense of purpose and an important point to
be made that don’t have to be dull or preachy.
Some of the best books I’ve ever read, both fiction and nonfiction,
examine important and interesting ideas, and do it while telling engaging
stories.
As writers, we should all strive to do the same, to not accept simply
telling a good story, but also tell a story that makes a point or engages the
reader to think about the world around them in a different way. I close with a thought: If Alice Walker’s novels explore the African American experience and allow their readers to gain some insight on that experience, then whose books explore the white male American experience and provide the same kind of insight? Where is the novel about a white male discovering what it is to be a white male in American, and to contrast it with the experience of all other Americans? If there isn’t, then which of us is going to write it? Pres
Says: Public appearances help your writing. Hopefully,
all of you were successful in completing and submitting your entries to the PNWA
literary contest this past month and have moved on to your next writing task.
For me, I’m on to writing a presentation on diversity that I’ll be giving
between when I write this column and when you read it. Fortunately, I’ve
got a three-day class on giving presentations before I have to give this
hour-long talk. If you don’t have an opportunity like that, then the
April meeting will be especially important to you. As we mentioned at the
last meeting, Peter Kahle and his coauthor Melanie Workhoven will be presenting
a short workshop on doing presentations. Thus, somewhat circularly, they
will be demonstrating the use of presentations to help sell their book while
teaching us to do the same. I
will, unfortunately, not be at the March meeting. I have been invited to
be a panelist in a class at the University of Washington Extension. While
the panel discussion isn’t directly related to writing (it’s about my day
job - project management), it is another opportunity to get out and speak in
front of the public – in preparation for that author’s tour I hope to get to
do some day. While I’m away, my colleague from work, Jill Heron, will introduce our speaker Marjorie Reynolds. As with many of our speakers this year, Marjorie was at the PNWA book signing party at the conclusion of last summer’s conference. When I spoke with her there, she was preparing a new talk about using subtext. Since then she’s had the opportunity to give a two-day workshop for the Oregon Writers Colony on subtext. She says it went very well, so we can expect a top-notch presentation. Somebody please take good notes for me. |
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Copyright © 2000-2006 Chris Powell. All rights reserved. |
