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Member News
| M. Elizabeth Clark announces the publication of her novel,
The Mothers' Group (Hutton Electronic Publishing, 2006. $21.95.
ISBN: 0-9742894-6-9), the story of four women—Molly, an all-American
beauty from Chicago, Elise, an entrenched yet irreverent socialite,
Jennifer, a sassy local architect and Claire, a neurotic and patrician
New Englander—whose lives become complicated as they navigate the
quirky and urbane world of San Francisco. |
| Kennette Reed announces the publication of her book,
Discovering Your Passion: The Things that Make Your Heart Sing
(Krau Publications, 2006. $29.95. ISBN: 0971371822). Discovering
Your Passion offers the tools needed to begin the journey of
uncovering the joy and excitement that comes when individual skills,
talents, and innate desires are revealed. You can visit Kennette at
www.kraupublications.com. As part of her book
tour, she will also be signing books at Cody's Bookstore in San
Francisco on Wednesday, April 5, 2006, from 11:30am-1:30pm, and be
interviewed on KRON-TV Morning News on Sunday, April 9, 2006, from
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Local author and WNBA member Geri Spieler has won a literary
prize for an excerpt from her book An Unlikely Assassin: Sara
Jane Moore and the Plot to Kill the President. Spieler was
awarded second prize in the non-fiction category of the 2006
Writing Contest of the San Francisco Writers Conference. The third
annual conference was held February 17-19 at the Mark Hopkins Hotel
in San Francisco. Her work was one of nearly 300 entries in the
international competition. She was awarded a $100 prize and a
certificate at the conference, which annually brings together
authors, editors and literary agents. An Unlikely Assassin
is the compelling story of Sara Jane Moore, the only woman who ever
fired a shot at an American President. Spieler has known Sara Jane
Moore for almost 30 years, and did groundbreaking investigative
research for this book—and found shocking material never before
released.
Spieler is a former journalist and writer for the Los Angeles
Times and the San Francisco Chronicle and is a
contributor to many magazines. She lives with her husband and six
chickens in Palo Alto. See her web site here: www.gerispieler.com.
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WNBA Events
•Join us on April 27 at Valencia St. Books for a Benefit Reading for our
sponsoring bookstore. As many of you know, independent book stores are having a
difficult time these days, and we want to help Valencia St. Books stay open and
vibrant. As an incentive, the bookstore is offering us 5% off any book (s) we order
or buy. Bring something to read and a used book to donate to the store. Details to
come!
•Join WNBA on May 23, 2006 for our "From Passion to Publicity" panel.
Chaired by Lin Lacombe, VP and Publicity Chair for WNBA and an independent
publicity consultant who will discuss the art of book publicity and promotion for
published and unpublished authors. She'll give us information on how to attract
media in print, on the web, on the air, at industry conferences, and more. Lin
recently presented at the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association Get
Published! Symposium speaking on independent book publishing and marketing, and her
session was packed!
Paula Hendricks, who is a published author and photographer, will join her. Her
company, Cinnabar Bridge Communications, specializes in book projects: from
publishing a book as a marketing tool, to creating a great cover, to developing the
plans that will make your book a success. Come find out how you can get started
marketing your passion! Details in next month's newsletter.
WATCH FOR INVITES TO OUR UPCOMING EVENTS:
- Thursday, April 27: Benefit Reading for Valencia Street Books
- May 17: Annual Effie Lee Morris Lecture and Reception—SF Public
Library
- May 23: Promoting your book
- June 9th: National Meeting—be sure to get your questions and input to us by
June 5th
In 2007:
- Meet the Agents
- Litquake—WNBA reading TBS
- Two Part Blogging Workshop
- Authors Showcase
- Mixers
- Holiday Party
- And more…
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In This Issue
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Welcome
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Welcome to the April edition of Bookworm, our monthly Newsletter—news and events
featuring San Francisco WNBA members!
"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself"
—Albert Camus
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From Our Chapter President
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April is National Poetry Month. When the Lilly Foundation bestowed $100 million
dollars to the Poetry Foundation, poetry in this country got a new lease on life.
There are more grants and programs available to poets and writers than ever before.
Thank you to our member Deborah Grossman who told us about a great resource for
poets: click on www.poetslane.org for all the latest information on readings,
classes, conferences as well as contests and calls for submissions. In honor of
National Poetry Month, the Poetry Foundation (www.PoetryFoundation.org) will deliver daily poetry podcasts
of poetry readings, interviews with poets and documentaries on poetry.
WNBA member and poet Kevin Arnold is a member of the board of Poetry Center San
Jose. On May 20th they will sponsor an all day festival with Al Young, California
State Poet Laureate. They have a great line-up of poets, and information tables on
small presses. Check the website for more info: www.californiapoetsfestival.org.
Enjoy Poetry Month! Go to a reading, buy a poetry book, or write a poem! And let
us know about anything extraordinary you encountered.
In other news, WNBA-SF has just broken 100 members—at last count we had 110
bookwomen and men in our group. We are writers, academics, teachers, literary
agents, booksellers and friends of the book. Our chapter now ranks up with the
largest WNBA chapters—New York, Washington, D.C., Boston and Nashville.
Renewal letters are in the mail. In an attempt to get everyone onto the same
renewal schedule, and to make our bookkeeping more manageable, we have sent
individualized letters to you. Let us know if you have any questions about the new
system.
Have a great month,
—Joan Gelfand
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BookWorm Talks to Cara Black, author of Murder in
Montmartre
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 WNBA-SF member and author Cara Black lives in San Francisco with her
husband, a bookseller, and their teenage son. She is the acclaimed author of
the Aimée Leduc Mystery series. The latest novel in the series, Murder in
the Montmartre, is an April BookSense pick and a Los Angeles Times
bestseller. In Murder in Montmartre, a childhood friend of investigator
Aimée Leduc is accused of shooting her partner. In order to clear her friend of
the charges against her, Aimée must confront Corsican Separatist terrorists,
Montmartre prostitutes, a Surrealist painter's stepdaughter, the French
Security Services and the Parisian police. But in so doing Aimée comes one step
closer to identifying the culprit in her own father's death, a death that still
haunts her.
Cara is a member of the Paris Sociéte Historique in the Marais. Like her
protagonist, Aimée, Cara once had a moped and appreciates their temperamental
tendencies. She also, like Aimée, likes dogs and owns a Coton de Tulear. Unlike
Aimée, she has never owned an apartment on the Ile St. Louis but feels she will
someday when the lottery smiles on her. She loves black and white photography, in
addition to writing. Visit Cara at www.carablack.com.
- When did you start writing?
- I kept journals on my first trip to Europe (that was in the Middle Ages),
but as a hitchhiking backpacker, I kept dropping them down the sewers in Paris
or losing them in train stations so I gave up. I finally started writing when
my son entered preschool and there was a space of 3 free hours a day. Luckily I
got into a fiction class at UC extension and then into a writing group, to
which I still belong to today.
- Why did you choose your particular genre?
- This connects with your next question but the story I wanted to tell had
such a broad scope, historical background and context that I realized narrowing
it down and using the framework and structure of a detective novel could really
help me tell it much better.
- What inspired you to choose your subject matter?
 In 1984 a friend in Paris took me to the Marais, then still an
un-gentrified quartier and showed me the apartment her mother had lived in
during the German Occupation of Paris in WWII. Her mother, a
fourteen-year-old schoolgirl at the time, had worn a yellow star and lived
on rue des Rosiers the Jewish section with her family. One day in 1943
when she came home from school, the apartment was empty, her family gone.
Not knowing when they'd return or what to do or if the French Police under
German orders would come back for her, she asked the concierge's help. The
concierge helped her with ration and coal coupons and she lived there for
a year on her own, going to school and somehow avoided being round up for
deportation. At Liberation in 1944 she stood outside the Hotel Lutetia
(then a Red Cross terminus for Holocaust survivors returning from the
camps) every day after school hoping to find news of her family. One day a
woman took her aside and told her, 'I saw your sister get off the train at
Auschwitz'. And then she knew, but that was all the information she ever
found out. Hearing this story, standing on the narrow street in the Marais
touched me in a deep way. I couldn't get it out of head. Years later when
I took the writing class, I just knew somehow I had to tell this story and
weave it with contemporary events in France (then 1994) at the time they
were joining the European Union. And how the past never really goes
away.- How difficult / easy has your experience been as a published
author?
- Writing is something I have to do. Bottom-line. I'm useless otherwise. The
highs and the lows come, like everything else in life, but at least at 3am in
the morning there are not many jobs one can do that aren't illegal or
fattening. Seriously, book promotion is another part of the job that I had no
clue about. And these days it's de rigueur. But I love my publishing house,
they are a feisty independent quality New York press that take chances, let me
take risks and roll up their sleeves and really edit the old fashioned way. I
think I'm very lucky.
- What advice would you give other aspiring authors?
- Be passionate about what you write...I don't always agree with the saying
'write what you know' for me the saying 'write what you're passionate to know'
really applies. I had a familiarity with France, things French but never knew
Paris the way I do now when I started writing. I still discover amazing things
all the time and my research leads me to unknown corners, which I hope keep the
stories fresh. And don't forget sensory details, one or more on every page,
that bring your reader to that uneven cobbled street in Paris inhaling the
smell of fresh baked bread and hearing the hee-haw police siren in the
distance.
- Anything else you would like to share with the WNBA?
- Voltaire said "Writing is rewriting" and that's on a pink Post-it stuck on
my computer. Every few days I scrunch it up, throw it across the room. And then
when I calm down make another one and try to follow his advice.
Are you a WNBA-SF member and published author? Would you like to share your
story with WNBA-SF? Contact the editor for the chance to be featured in our Member
Profile section of BookWorm!
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BookWorm Talks to Elaine Dallman, author of Nevadans
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WNBA-SF member Elaine Dallman has been active throughout her literary career
in programs that bring poets and poetry directly into the community. One hundred
and eight five of her poems have been printed in a wide variety of literary
anthologies, including Celebration of Writers, Discover America, as well as in
literary journals such as Epoch and Peregrine; more are forthcoming in Home Means
Nevada: Literature of the Silver State. In 2005, Finishing Line Press published a
chapbook of her poetry, Nevadans. Her work was discussed at a Modern Language
Association session led by Dr. M. Lou Lewandowska, and she has won 125 national and
international contests, including The Stroud International Festival, The Poetry
Society of England, and The Poetry Society of America. In addition, Ms. Dallman has
received sixteen grants and scholarships for innovative teaching, writing and
publishing from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts through
the Nevada State Council of the Arts, The American Association of University Women,
the Illinois Arts Council, and Villa Montalvo. Through the Nevada State Council of
Humanities, she directed workshops in which thousands of men and women enrolled.
She is presently on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Poetry Museum.
Visit her at www.elainedallman.com.
- When did you start writing?
- 1965
- Why did you choose your particular genre?
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 I naturally wrote in it.
- What inspired you to choose your subject matter?
- What was happening to me in life.
- How difficult / easy has your experience been as a published
author?
- a) The mental satisfaction that follows the achievement of writing a good
poem is a major motivation. b) It is very difficult to sell poetry books.
- What advice would you give other aspiring authors?
- To succeed, write bland poetry. Go into fiction, or better yet, engineering
or business.
- Anything else you would like to share with the WNBA?
- The relentless drive to revise a poem until totally "done" is very
satisfying. It's like a victory of spirit over matter. There is a growth of
mind in writing and in reading deep poetry.
Are you a WNBA-SF member and published author? Would you like to share your
story with WNBA-SF? Contact the editor for the chance to be featured in our Member
Profile section of BookWorm!
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Classes, Conferences, and Other Writing Announcements
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"You Want to Write" workshop with WNBA-SF member, author, and board treasurer
Teresa LeYung Ryan, Saturday April 29, 9-11:30am
Whether you're writing articles, short stories, or books, Teresa LeYung Ryan will
help you identify the themes and give you resources so that you can get your work
published. The first 90 minutes we'll focus on your current project (examine themes
and archetypes). The last 30 minutes Teresa will answer questions about the
publishing arena. Please bring publications (including books) that you enjoy
reading and your current project.
Teresa LeYung Ryan is the author of the novel Love Made of Heart (now
archived at the San Francisco History Center, and recommended by the California
School Library Association). Teresa is also a career coach for writers. She says,
"I want to see everyone step into their dreams." For more information about Teresa,
go to www.LoveMadeOfHeart.com.
For registration details please checkout the Foster City Spring Leisure Update
or visit the Foster City Recreation Center. To register online please visit
payment.fostercity.org/sdi or www.fostercity.org
and under "Services" click on "Classes".
Age Level: 18-Up Course No. 3001.041
Cost: $25 Foster City residents; $30 non-residents
When: Saturday, April 29: 9-9:30am continental breakfast; 9:30-11:30am workshop
Where: Foster City Recreation Center, Crane Room (corner of Shell and Hillsdale),
Foster City CA
Poetry event at California Writers Club, Peninsula Branch, Saturday April 15,
2006, 10am-noon
On Saturday April 15, 2005, 10:00-noon in Belmont, celebrate National Poetry Month
with the members of California Writers Club-SF/Peninsula Branch and poet Stephen J.
Wersan. Many WNBA members are also CWC members. Margaret Davis will be receiving
the Louise Boggess award at this meeting.
When: General meeting 10:00-11:00am; 11:00-noon Stephen J. Wersan. Come and
build relationships.
Cost (Includes a continental breakfast): $15 for CWC members; $18 for
non-members.
For more information, go to www.sfpeninsulawriters.com/events/meetings.html.
Workshops offered by Editcetera in April
Editcetera, a cooperative association of freelance publishing professionals, is
offering the following workshops in April, 2006.
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The Versatile Copyeditor
When: Six Wednesdays: April 19-May 24, 6:30-9pm.
Cost: $290 for enrollments paid on or before April 12; $310 after April 12.
Class limit: 24
Instructor: Amy Einsohn
This course presents the knowledge and skills that will prepare you to
copyedit books, journal articles, corporate documents, and newsletters.
Topics include hard-copy and on-screen procedures, tools and resources, and
the principles of editorial style.
The textbook for this course is The Copyeditor's Handbook,
written by the instructor and published by the University of California
Press. Plan to devote five hours a week outside of class to the reading and
copyediting assignments. The course concludes with a mail-in exercise that
will receive a detailed critique from the instructor.
Amy Einsohn is a freelance editor and writer with more than twenty years
of experience in the Bay Area business, publishing, and academic
communities. She has taught editing classes through Editcetera since 1986
and has also taught at UC Berkeley and UC Berkeley Extension.
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Building Your Editorial Career: Opportunities and Strategies
When: Tuesday, April 25, 6:30-9:30pm
Cost: $75 for enrollments paid on or before April 18; $85 after April 18
Class limit: 24
Instructor: Barbara Fuller
Whether you are an experienced editor or want to become one, this
workshop gives you information on the wide range of Bay Area clients who
regularly hire editors and on strategies you can use to obtain the work.
You learn how to prepare for an editorial career, present your services to
potential clients, and maintain good working relationships. Bring questions
with you.
Barbara Fuller has worked in publishing since 1985 for a variety of
clients, including Computer Literacy Press, Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Institute for the Future, KQED Books, Lucas Learning,
McGraw-Hill/Contemporary, National Association of Neonatal Nurses, Prima
Publishing, Sierra Club Books, Sierra magazine, and Ten Speed Press. As
director of Editcetera, she has helped connect hundreds of clients with
qualified freelance publications professionals. She has taught writing at
UC Davis and editing for UC Berkeley Extension as well as for
Editcetera.
Where: First Presbyterian Church, 2407 Dana St, between Haste St and Channing
Way, Berkeley CA.
For more information, or to register for a class, go to www.editcetera.com/workshops.htm or call Editcetera at
510-849-1110.
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