San Francisco Peninsula Writer
Writers Helping Writers Since 1909
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The reminder arrived from our marketing team right on schedule on the Monday after our meeting, the first ever held at the San Mateo County Fair Literary Stage.
“Here’s what I’m expecting,” the email read. “1) President's Message — Audrey.”
My first thought was “What have I gotten myself into?”
My next thought was “What the heck? You’ve written books and short stories and articles but now you’re worried about writing a message for the CWC newsletter once a month?”
Then I realized the source of my trepidation. It’s the same feeling I get whenever I step into the unknown, whether a big unknown like becoming a parent or a smaller one like taking on a new job at a familiar organization. A little
frisson (that’s French for shiver) of anxiety. A little bit of self-doubt.
Can I do it?
It’s the same feeling many of us—no matter how long we’ve been writing—feel when we embark on a new project. No matter how many stories I write, I never know if the one I’m working on is any good. I don’t know what it will turn into, or how readers will feel about it. And that’s okay. The unknown can be half the fun. (All right, maybe thirty percent.)
The next thing I realized is that I’m far from alone. While I’m new to the role of president, I am surrounded by an amazing team of talented and experienced volunteers. That safety net of support is exactly what our club also provides to all our members around the writing process.
New beginnings
are wonderful, but old traditions are great, too. This month we revive one that has slipped by the wayside in recent years: our annual picnic. It’s scheduled for Sunday, July 13 at Belmont’s Twin Pines Park. Look for details further down in the newsletter. We’re planning a fun and relaxing day where you’ll get to hang out with fellow writers.
Here’s to new beginnings, for presidents and writers both, and to old traditions.
Happy writing,
Audrey
P.S. Don't forget another annual tradition happening this month:
membership renewal
. Please see details below and keep your eye out for an email from our membership team with your renewal instructions.
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July Highlights:
- President’s Message
- CWC Summer Picnic
- Renew your membership
- CWC Service Awards
- CWC Literary Stage at the San Mateo County Fair Winners
- Writers Block Party Highlights
- In Memoriam: Bardi Rosman Koodrin
- August Speaker Preview
- Bay Area Generations Reading
- Member News
- Book Promotion Advice by Laurel Anne Hill
- Upcoming Conferences and Workshops
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CWC SF Peninsula 2019 Summer Picnic
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We’ve skipped a couple of years, but our CWC SF Peninsula Summer Potluck Picnic is back!
Date: Saturday, July 13
Time: 11:00am-3:00pm
Place: Twin Pines Park, Belmont, Redwood Picnic Area
(through the park and over the bridge)
What to bring: If your last name starts with:
A-I:
bring an appetizer for 8-10
J-R:
bring a main dish for 8-10
S-Z
: bring a dessert for 8-10
We will provide bottled water, soft drinks, paper products, utensils and tablecloths.
We will have an
Open Mic
. Bring something to read if you like.
Family and friends welcome.
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Take advantage of another year of
great benefits
that are yours for belonging to the SF Peninsula branch of the California Writers Club!
You will receive an email soon from the membership team with details on renewing for another year. It contains links to PayPal if you wish to make your renewal payment that way. We also take cash or check. We are once again offering the option to pre-pay for all your meetings for the year, giving yourself the gift of two free meetings and streamlined check-in!
We’re looking forward to another year helping and learning from each other.
Your membership team
Tim Flood, Margaret Nalbach, Mark Dooley
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CWC SF Peninsula Branch Service Awards
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Thank you to our award winners for all you do for our club!
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Congratulations to
Laurel Anne Hill
, our branch recipient of this year’s CWC
Jack London Award
! This statewide award goes to CWC members who have performed exceptional and often unsung efforts on behalf of their branch.
We are very happy to honor Laurel Anne Hill. Read more about her
many contributions
on our website.
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2019 Louise Boggess Award
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Congratulations to
Carole Bumpus
, the newest recipient of the CWC San Francisco Peninsula Branch’s
Louise Boggess Award
! Instituted in 1996 in honor of our branch founder, this award is given to a member who has performed the most valuable services to the branch in the preceding year.
We are absolutely delighted to give Carole the Louise Boggess Award. Please visit our website to read more about
her
many accomplishments.
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The CWC Literary Stage
at the San Mateo County Fair Winners
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Literary Stage "Writer of the Year" 2019
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We are pleased to announce that the winner of the
CWC Writer of the Year Short Story Contest is
Karen Sundback! Karen will receive a free year of membership in the CWC.
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Literary Stage Volunteer of the Year 2019
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Congratulations to the
Literary Stage Volunteer of the Year
:
Nancy Desantis
! Nancy’s name was selected at random from this year’s roster of volunteers. She will receive a free year of Membership in the CWC.
Thank you to all of our hard working volunteers!
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Writers Block Party at the Fair Recap
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On Saturday, June 15, 2019 we held our first-ever
WRITERS BLOCK PARTY following our first-ever monthly meeting at the Literary Stage. The day’s festivities included:
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Writer, writing coach, and teacher
Jane Anne Staw exploring strategies to help writers who struggle with getting started. She emphasized the importance of carving out a regular time and space to write, even if only a few minutes, at least five days a week.
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Storytelling headliners: spoken word artist and story
Gary Turchin and San-Francisco-based writer
Ron Jones. Gary told several stories, including a very personal one. Ron’s story “Birds,” although created years ago, continues to have great resonance in today’s world.
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Storyteller and multiple Moth StorySLAM winner
Jeff Hanson shared a strategy and structure for turning a personal story into a five-minute presentation to fit the Moth’s “true stories, told live” format—including using the “once upon a time… and then…” structure of fairy tales and “locating” each beat of your story in a different part of your body.
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Singer, songwriter, and performer
Sam Kauffman got our creative juices flowing with brainstorming synonyms and thinking about rewriting the lyrics to a favorite song.
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And throughout the day, we raffled off fun literary prizes, including the coveted “GO AWAY, I’M WRITING” bags. It was a great day!
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We are very sad to announce that our dear friend and long-time CWC member and board member Bardi Rosman Koodrin passed away on June 15 after a two-year battle with jaw cancer. She left this earth only hours before our meeting and all-day “Writers Block Party” at the San Mateo County Fair. It was a fitting farewell, as we celebrated writers and writing, community, the creative spirit, and various partnerships on the CWC Literary Stage that Bardi founded and created.
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When Bardi first took on this annual task eleven years ago the Literary Arts department at the Fair was just a three-ring binder that held the winning contest entries and sat on a table, largely ignored. Today it is a CWC-sponsored division of the fair that hosts panels, readings, performances, workshops and other literary events for eight days every June, along with expanded literary contests with printed entries of stories, poems and more decorating the walls all around the stage. Bardi was with us in spirit on the 15th, no longer bound by illness to her bed.
Bardi was a talented writer, a big personality, a determined advocate of the arts. She was funny and wise and a great friend. We will miss her greatly, but we celebrate her and continue to “Carry the Light,” the eternal theme of the Literary Stage. Our love goes to Bardi’s husband Boris, who will be planning a memorial for Bardi to celebrate her life. Details to come.
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Happening Now
SHUT UP & WRITE
Every Tuesday in Foster City
9:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
July 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, 2019
Every Thursday in San Mateo -
NEW!
6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
July 11, 18, 25, 2019
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WRITERS HELPING WRITERS
will be on hiatus for the summer
See you in September!
Workshop:
Mastering Memoir with Brooke Warner
September 28, 2019
9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
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Summer Picnic
July 13, 2019
11:00 a.m.
Twin Pines Park, Belmont
Redwood Picnic Area
(through the park and over the bridge)
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MONTHLY MEETING
3rd Saturday of each month
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August 16, 2019 - Kevin Fisher-Paulson
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OPEN MIC
4th Tuesday in San Carlos
7:00 to 8:30 p.m.
We get together to share our original work in a warm and welcoming environment. Members and non-members are welcome. Too shy to share? Come as part of the audience. FREE
July 23, 2019
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OPEN MIC
4th Tuesday of each month
August 27, 2019
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Kevin Fisher-Paulson, a weekly columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, talks about the craft of writing from the perspective of purpose and structure and will speak at our August 16 meeting.
"The writing process begins with a commitment to the creative self. As Kevin explains, everyone has an autobiography but not everyone has a memoir. Everyone has instructions, but not everyone has a poem. Kevin talks about choices, not habits, that usher the individual through the creative door. He gives a series of prompts for the real life that morph into prompts for the imaginative life."
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Bay Area Generations Reading
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Lisa Meltzer Penn, Amos White, President of Bay Area Generations, and Darlene Frank
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Vibha Akkeraju and her daughter Aanika
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Participants including Kristen Caven, President of CWC Berkeley
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On May 21, our CWC branch participated in the first-ever CWC takeover of Bay Area Generations! In this inter-generational curated reading series, writers submit work with a writing partner at least 10 years older or younger than they are. For this 69
th
edition of BAG, writing duos from CWC Berkeley and CWC SF Peninsula were selected to bring poetry, memoir, stories, spoken word, and performance pieces to the stage at Harrington Galleries in San Francisco. Our branch was represented by long-time members Darlene Frank and Lisa Meltzer Penn and new member Vibha
Akkaraju and her daughter Aanika.
It was a blast! Berkeley branch president Kristen Caven, who invited us to submit with her branch, suggested we team up to do this once a year. Of course, I said yes! Find out more about submitting to this extremely fun monthly series (with a published chapbook of the readings available for sale only at the event) at:
www.bayareagenerations.com
Lisa Meltzer Penn
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Would you like to see your news published here? Send your submissions to
newsletter@sfpeninsulawriters.com by the 23rd of the month with the subject line "CWC Newsletter Submissions."
Congratulations!
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All members should have received their copy of the annual CWC Literary Review in the mail. Congratulations to SF Peninsula members
Richard McCallum,
Nanci Lee Woody, and
Kate Adams, whose pieces appear in the Review. The submission window for the next volume is
September 1 to November 30. Details on
calwriters.org starting in late August.
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Laurel Anne Hill would like to refer authors planning a free or reduced book-price promotion to
Nicholas Erik's website.
Nicholas Erik, the author of the marketing guide, has described a procedure he uses for his own book promotions.
Laurel handed out copies of Erik’s marketing guide at our March Think Tank. She used the guide for her own three-day book promotion during the last week of May 2019. That book promotion of
The Engine Woman’s Light
included use of FreeBooksy, ENT, Fussy Librarian, Book Doggy, Facebook and Twitter. She used Online Book Club only because they owed her some promotional days to acquire book reviews. Nicholas Erik does not recommend use of Online Book Club because of the relatively high price. Laurel’s promotion resulted in the following statistics:
- #59 in the Free in Kindle Store on May 29, and #1 in four sub-categories
- # 14,062 in the Paid in Kindle Store on May 31, and #4, #7 and #11 in three sub-categories
- Nearly 3,100 downloads during the 3-day free promotion
- 13 days in a row on various Amazon Best Seller Lists (May 27 – June 8)
- Between May 27 and June 18, on various Amazon Best Seller Lists for 19 out of 23 days.
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Upcoming Conferences and Workshops
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CWC SF Peninsula Presents:
Mastering Memoir with Brooke Warner
September 28, 2019
9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Twin Pines Lodge in Belmont
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Memoir expert and enthusiast
Brooke Warner
brings energy and passion to her teaching of memoir, supporting writers to find ways to make their stories bigger and more meaningful than simply “what happened.” This workshop will guide writers through the most important craft elements: scene, narration, character development/characterization, memory and flashback, reflection and takeaway. And we’ll examine popular memoirs that execute these elements of craft beautifully so that writers will grasp how to implement what they learn in their own writing.
Whether you’re a beginning memoirist or well into your project, this workshop will give you hands-on strategies to deepen your work and, most importantly, write scenes and characters that make readers care.
Enter code
CWC
for special
CWC member pricing ($15 off)
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A beta reader is someone who will read a story as if he or she had picked it off a bookshelf, and who will give the author feedback accordingly. The reader and the author get to decide the breadth and depth of the evaluation. Keep in mind that a beta reader is not a critique partner or editor.
In the spirit of writers helping writers, please consider being a beta reader. Many members reading one book a year means support for many writers. And, it's not all one-sided. A thoughtful analysis of a book is a learning experience for better writing. Plus you get to be one of the first to read a brand-new book.
Author Eligibility:
Author must be a CWC SF Peninsula member with completed book length fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry or short story collection.
AUTHOR BETA READER SIGN UP
Do you have a finished book ready for beta readers? If so,
sign up here.
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Check out the updated
Writers' Corner
page on the SF Peninsula CWC website, where you'll find a list of resources to help you write and get published. Listings include publications and small presses founded or edited by branch members, literary magazines where members' work is published, local writing conferences and contests, and local writing organizations.
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This is the place to find Volunteer Opportunities and Member Ads.
If you would like to submit an ad related to a writing need or service, send your submission to:
Subject line: "CWC Newsletter - Classified Ads"
Together, we can promote our club, boost your career and get you the help you need to move forward with your writing projects.
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Writers Helping Writers at the Libraries
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Although the Writers Helping Writers Program is taking a hiatus this summer, we are still taking names for the months of September 2019 through May of 2020. If you would enjoy sharing your talents and ‘writerly’ expertise with a small group of new writers, please contact Carole Bumpus at
carole.bumpus@yahoo.com
But, you ask, what do we have to do? The answer is you provide a short description of what you choose to teach, you prepare a short 1 ½ hour program with handouts or hands-on practice of a helpful practice for new writers, you provide a short bio of yourself, and you sign up with Carole – for either the San Mateo Public Library or San Carlos Library and you choose the month you prefer to teach. San Mateo Library group meets the second Wednesday of the month and San Carlos Library meets the third Wednesday of the month. Come share your ideas, expertise and talents, make new friends and encourage new writers to come join us at the San Francisco Peninsula CWC.
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Marketing Team Members Needed
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The marketing team is looking for assistants to help out with marketing for our club. If you have expertise or interest in marketing, we would love to have you join our team. We need help with proofreading the newsletter, posting our events on social media, emails to club members, and working on our website. These are volunteer positions and we can work around your schedule. If you can help with any of these areas, please contact Melanie Shook
(melanie.shook@gmail.com) for more information. Also keep a look-out for our upcoming Marketing Brainstorming Social. We want your ideas!
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Have you joined a Writers Critique Group? Are you looking for more members? If you're looking for match-ups, come to a meeting or post your group here next month.
EXISTING GROUPS:
San Mateo: Meets on the 2nd and 4th Friday each month, 10:30 a.m. to noon at the Peninsula Regent, 1 Baldwin Avenue, San Mateo, rear of the large meeting room opposite the elevator. Bring at least 5 copies of your no-longer-than-6-page manuscript to hand out. For more info, contact Karen Hartley at
sew1machin@icloud.com
or (408) 315-0271.
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Executive Board:
President: Audrey Kalman
Vice President: Geri Spieler
Secretary: Korie Pelka
Treasurer: Jean Morrow
Appointed Board Positions:
State Board & NorCal Rep: Carole Bumpus
Membership Co-Chair: Tim Flood
Marketing & Outreach Chair: Melanie Shook
Newsletter Editor: Melanie Shook
Fault Zone Editor-in-Chief: Laurel Anne Hill
Non-Voting Positions:
Immediate Past President: Lisa Meltzer Penn
Volunteer Coordinator: Carole Bumpus
Membership Co-Chairs: Margaret Nalbach, Mark Dooley
Web Manager: Mindy Yang
Hospitality Co-Chairs: Megan McDonald and Carol Park
Think Tank: Geri Spieler
Parliamentarian: Alisha Willis
Member-at-Large: Bette Houtchens
Acting SMCF Literary Stage Coordinator: Sue Barizon
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Guidelines for Submitting to this Newsletter
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Want to see your article, ad or poem published here?
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Submission deadline is the
23rd
of the month.
Keep in Mind:
- You must be a current member of the club.
- Your article or news must be related to writing.
- Your piece shall not exceed 350 words.
Format Requirements:
- Include "CWC Newsletter submission" in subject line and add what you are submitting, i.e. Member News, Article, Critique Group, Member Resources, Think Tank, Event, Classified Ad, etc.
- Use Word or write text within the body of the email.
- One space (not two) at the end of sentences.
- Edit and proofread carefully before sending. If accepted, your article will be printed as submitted.
- If you have a picture to include, send it as a jpeg attachment to your email.
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