A Celebration for Writers...and the people who love them
The final event of the 2008 Manzanita Writers’ Series will be a party to celebrate our local writers and the wonderful people who support their writing and their open mic readings. This will be an opportunity for the local community to join their friends and neighbors who are writers as they celebrate their year of writing – and look toward the future.
For this event, we’ve invited local writers who had a book published during 2008 to read from their work during the first hour of the event. Tricia Gates Brown published 118 Days: Christian Peacemaker Team Held Hostage in Iraq as well as a book of poetry, Sackcloth and Ashes. Joan Cutuly published Prisoner of Second Grade. Garry Gitzen published Francis Drake in Nehalem Bay 1579 -- Setting the Historical Record Straight. Michele Longo Eder published Salt in Our Blood: The Memoir of a Fisherman’s Wife.
The second hour will include our regular Open Mic event allowing five local writers to read a piece of their original work.
We’ll have food, wine, music and extra time factored in for socializing in our fun café/cabaret atmosphere. We’ll also have poster paper on the walls for local writers to write their writing intentions for 2009 – in order to tap into the support and accountability of this wonderful community.
As part of our fundraising to keep the Writers’ Series going, we’ll be selling mugs and notebooks with the Writers’ Series logo and a reminder to “Write,” the perfect gift for any writer in your family (or for yourself).
We love the fact that a number of writers are using this monthly event as a deadline to create a new piece they can read in the five-minute format. For anyone who wants to do that and is looking for a new writing prompt, possibly for the December 20 event, here are some favorites:
I remember…
Write about mashed potatoes…or your mother’s hands.
Find an old photo and use that to start a story. As Vera Wildauer says, “I like to use bad photos, where people have weird expressions, or are turned away.”
To practice dialog, put two extremely different people together, where at least one of them might be very uncomfortable. Like a janitor and a hedge fund manager.
Join us at this party on December 20th – doors open at 630pm. And mark your calendars for the third Saturday of each month in 2009 (with one exception in August—4th Saturday). The 2009 schedule of featured authors is at our website at http://www.hoffmancentermanzanita.org/manzanitawriters/2009.htm
Continuous Country
