Wannabee's Words

2010 South Coast Writers Conference

The South Coast Writers Conference just keeps getting better!

Although the bad economy seems to have affected attendance somewhat, and there appeared to be slightly fewer authors presenting workshops - again, due to economic concerns - the quality of the conference was very high.

I noticed at the Authors Night readings on Friday night that this was possibly the best group of readers ever. The Keynote Speaker was Naseem Rakha, author of The Crying Tree. Rahka is an award winning journalist whose stories have been heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” as well as other venues. Her keynote presentation was one of the best – if not the best – I have heard at the SCWC since I have been attending.

For me, the conference started on Friday when I ran into author Melissa Hart at my motel – most of the authors were staying there - after breakfast. Since I had finished reading – “devouring” would really be a better word - Melissa’s two autobiographies, The Assault of Laughter and Gringa: a Contradictory Childhood, just days before, I was very excited to meet Melissa. Her memoirs are riveting, and I felt like I knew her after reading them. She is very friendly and accessible, as well as being a marvelous writer and great teacher. I got to find out the latter when I took her well-attended six-hour workshop on “Writing Memoir that Sells” that same day. In fact, I ended up sitting next to her and had further opportunities to talk with her. She had great handouts and readings to illustrate points and shared her own experiences in getting published.

Prior to the Authors Night keynote and readings, I ran into Jessica Page Morrell, who had been a workshop presenter at the Write on the Sound conference in Edmonds last October. I had met her when I purchased one of her books, Writing Out the Storm, at that conference’s reception and book signing. I had been very impressed with the book when I recently read it, and when I found another of her books, Thanks, But This isn’t for Us: a (Sort of) Compassionate Guide to Why Your Writing is Being Rejected, at Gold Beach Books the night before the conference, I bought a copy. At the end of the conference on Saturday afternoon, I won a door prize, and my selection was her book Between the Lines: the Subtle Elements of Fiction Writing, which she signed for me. I enjoyed meeting and talking with her again and am hoping to see her at WOTS this fall.

Saturday I took four 1-1/2 hour workshops: two with Melissa Hart, “Humorous Short Commentary about Serious Social Issues” and “The Art of the Short Essay,” as well as “It’s in the Cards” with David Lunde and “Harvest the Fruits of Your Life” by memoirist Sarahlee Lawrence. Lawrence is the author of River House: a Memoir. This was my year to explore memoir!

Lunde is a poet and translator; his workshop was challenging and fun. He gave every attendee four index cards, each with a set of five words on it, and gave us an hour to write a poem using four of the five words on whichever card we chose. Or you could pick an illustrated notecard and write a poem based on that instead. Many of the participants wrote several poems, and they were almost all very high quality. While it took me the whole hour to write just one poem, I was quite pleased with it and plan to polish it and send it off to a yet-to-be-determined publication. And since we got to keep the note cards with the words on them, I plan to write poems using them when I have time. I find this a good way to start a poem, more so than prompts. The next morning when I was checking out, I ran into Lunde in the motel parking lot, and we talked some more. It always amazes me just how down-to-earth most of the authors are.

In addition to my three poems and the poems, short stories, and photography by others in this year’s Rogue River Echoes, I noticed that both Dennis Powers and Keith Scales, presenters at the 2010 SCWC, had also had their submissions chosen for inclusion. What great company to be in!

The 17th Annual South Coast Writers Conference will be held on February 17th & 18th, 2012.

More Validation

Late Saturday night I received an e-mail from the South Coast Writers Conference announcing that three of the four poems I had submitted last summer for consideration for this year’s Rogue River Echoes are going to be published!

This was incredible news, especially when the e-mail included the comment that “we ordinarily do not select three entries from one writer, but the high quality of your writing merited it.”

This is a also a wonderful validation for someone who has her insecurities about how good her poetry really is and comes at a great time, when I am just beginning to submit to other publications and wondering if I will measure up, if I have a chance of getting published in them. It gives me a great deal of encouragement that that is possible.

One of my concerns has been whether my style of poetry is what editors are looking for these days, when so many of them seem to want “edgy” poems. I am definitely not into writing edgy things, nor do I particularly care to read them, either. I tend to judge myself against what is being published, even if I do not personally care for it. But I have decided that all I can really do is just write the way I do and hope there are enough other people – hopefully, some of them editors - who like my style.

I also struggle against the feeling that every poem I write must be wonderful. Looking back at the poems I posted on this site in 2009 when I was participating in the April Poem-a-Day Challenge, I find that the quality of my poems is all over the place: some are really good and some just are plain old bad, not even worthy of a rework. I have begun to realize that not every poem I write is going to be good. Some are going to be bad, and that’s okay. I don’t suppose there has ever been a poet whose every poem was brilliant, with the possible exception of the Bard himself. So maybe I should be a little gentler in judging myself.

I’ve also begun to see how very important it is to set aside a “finished” poem for a while before really considering it finished. Many of those 2009 poems that I was satisfied with at the time I wrote them now strike me as not finished at all. I have learned since then what I can do to improve the more deserving ones. And I am learning that some are just plain bad poems that I shouldn’t waste any more time on.

I am now thinking about doing a chapbook of my published poems, though it will be a while before I have enough of those to fill it! But it seems that taking the best of the best is a wise idea for a first publication.

At the moment, I am just reveling in the good news about my three poems, which I have posted below. One of them is “Paper Ephemera” which won me the Bob Simons Scholarship Award for last year’s SCWC.


Drift Away

As I approach the final stage
of my brief passage,
this is my wish: to drift away
down a finally peaceful river,
where no rapids disturb
my lazy progress toward the sunset;
where all is calm and beautiful,
if only for that short time;

where lush green riverbanks give way
to majestic mountains in the distance;
where birds warble their hellos,
and frogs croak out goodbyes
as I glide silently by on my way to the sea,
relishing my last moments
on this particular river
in the deepening twilight.

Lord knows the trip I’ve made so far
has often been a turbulent one,
and I have sometimes gone far out of my way,
paddling up creeks that joined into the river,
but did not go where I thought they would,
wasting precious time in backtracking.
Sometimes I’ve traveled with another,
most times it’s been alone and now and then lonely.

On more than one occasion I have found myself
in a swirling eddy, going round and round
in circles, making no forward progress;
or going over unexpected waterfalls
and miraculously surviving the drop;
or falling into holes in the churning rapids,
then suddenly rising again into the sunlight,
relieved to be alive to see another day.

Sometimes I’ve beached my boat
and pitched my tent on a sand bar,
staying in one place for a while,
listening to the wind in the trees,
gazing at starlit night skies with crescent moons,
wishing the river could go on forever.

But all rivers run to the sea eventually,
and mine runs into the sea of the eternal now,
where I will be absorbed back into all of life,
into all that is, into God, until once again,
in the never-ending cycle of the universe,
I find myself re-born on a new river
and begin the journey once more.

by Carol Berger


Putting Out Brush Fires

After all the years,
I am tired of putting out brush fires.
Let someone else throw water on them.
Or let them burn and consume
all within their range.
I care not.

I am re-claiming my life,
leaving the brush fires behind,
to deal with more important things:
the sound of angry waves
crashing on the rocky shore,
the autumn sun
angling across a field of fallen leaves,
the softness of a lush carpet
of deep green grass beneath my feet,
the scent of lavender fields
on a hot summer day,
the taste of ripe raspberries
melting on my tongue.

No longer will I waste my time
squelching minor conflagrations
that have nothing to do with who I am
and make no difference to anyone
in the long run.

Instead, I will find my freedom
on the rapids of a raging green river;
my peace, in wild pink rhododendrons
dwelling in quiet redwood forests;
my contentment, in sunset and twilight
and the evening stars in the vast, dark sky.

And not least, I will find my joy,
in knowing that for me,
there are no more brush fires.

by Carol Berger


Paper Ephemera

It is all there in the photo albums
and the postcard books:
the people, places, and things
that have made up my life.

If they could, each picture,
each card, would tell
its story in more depth,
but they cannot speak,
cannot reveal what lies behind
the surface of their silence.

No one but I
can tell those stories.

They will die with me,
taking with them the love,
the laughter, the beauty,
the excitement, discovery, and hope,
along with the all challenges,
changes, and choices of
one woman’s lifetime -
the quiet victories, the silent joys,
and moments of peace
that only I could recount.

Gone, too, will be the fears,
the failures, the heartbreaks,
the confusions, betrayals, and
disappointments – the quiet losses,
the silent sorrows of a life
that was not always so well-lived
as those photos and postcards
would suggest.

Though the artifacts remain,
the memories will be gone,
and these painstakingly
preserved records of my life
will become nothing more
than meaningless scraps
of glossy paper.

by Carol Berger

2010 Write on the Sound Writers Conference

The 25th Write on the Sound Writers Conference was held in Edmonds, Washington on Oct. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, 2010. Having recently relocated to Corvallis, Oregon and thus living much closer to the state of Washington than I had been before, I decided to make a road trip to Edmonds to attend the conference and see my long-distance boyfriend who lives not far away from Edmonds.

This was the first time I had attended any writers conference other than the South Coast Writers Conference, which I have attended for the past four years. WOTS is a much larger conference, with double the attendance as the SCWC. It has a maximum limit of 200 attendees and always sells out. This year since it was the 25th anniversary, attendees were given a free pen and tote bag with a 25th anniversary logo. Very nice!

WOTS also runs for three days rather than the two I was used to. I enjoyed the extra day, as it meant that many more workshops to attend! While there is no Author’s Night as at the SCWC, there is a Keynote Speaker Saturday afternoon, and there was an author’s book signing and reception on Saturday night, complete with refreshments and music, where you could meet many of the authors who were presenting workshops over the weekend. There was also a temporary bookstore open during the day for attendees to purchase books and other items.

Having enjoyed my first all-day intensive workshop at SCWC earlier that year, I decided to take a five-hour workshop on Friday on poetry with instructor Holly Hughes. Class size was limited to ten, and all of us were women. Hughes is a very good instructor as well as poet. In the weeks before the conference, she asked us all to e-mail some of our poetry to be critiqued during the workshop. Thus, we had had a chance to read and make notes on what we thought of the other attendees’ poetry in advance. During the workshop itself, the poems were discussed and critiqued by Hughes and the other attendees. This was a very valuable experience as well as being more enjoyable than being critiqued might seem at first.

Keynote Speaker was the famous Natalie Goldberg, who was honest, funny, and inspiring. I question the wisdom of having the Keynote Speaker scheduled in the middle of the day on Saturday, however. Lunch ran from 11:45 to 12:45 with Goldberg’s presentation from 1:00 to 2:30. This was at a separate venue and open to the public, with book sales afterward. I found it rather challenging to pick up my box lunch, walk to where my car was parked on the street, drive to the new venue, eat my boxed lunch in the car, and still find a seat. Afterwards, knowing I had to reverse the action and get back for my 2:45 workshop, I decided to forgo book sales and headed back, circling the block until I finally found a parking spot near the conference. It seemed to me that this event would be better scheduled in the evening as it is at the SCWC, so there wasn’t such a feeling of having to rush.

On Sunday, there was an on-site author reading from 1:00 to 1:30, overlapping the lunch break from 12:15 to 1:30, so attendees could eat lunch first and then stay for the reading. Craig English, an award-winning author who was a professional actor for 25 years, read from his book The Anvil of Navarre. This was a wonderfully interpretive reading as you might expect from a former actor, and the book is fascinating,

In two days on Saturday and Sunday, I was able to attend eight different workshops of from 1 hour and 15 minutes to 1 hour and 30 minutes. The presenters ranged from good to outstanding. I especially enjoyed workshops by David Laskin - with whom I was able to talk with more at the Saturday night authors book signing and reception - who spoke on writing creative non-fiction; David Williams who talked about how to launch a freelance career writing for magazines; and the incredible Roy Stevenson, whom I had just read an article by in The Writer Magazine describing how he had sold more than 450 articles in just 33 months! Stevenson discussed “Writing Irresistible Query Letters” and was a fascinating and enthusiastic speaker.

WOTS was very much a whirlwind experience, but a very good one. I am hoping that my schedule will permit me to attend this coming October, when WOTS will be held September 30th and October 1st and 2nd.

South Coast Writers Conference 2010

The 15th Annual South Coast Writers Conference was held on February 12th and 13th, 2010 in Gold Beach, Oregon. It was my intention to report on it immediately afterward, but life sometimes has other plans, and it has been a year since I wrote anything on this website.

During that time, I have attended a number of other book and literary events that I would like to report on, but I want to go back and cover the SCWC first.

If you have read my posting for February 1, 2010, you will know that I was very excited about the conference.

It turned out that it greatly exceeded even those expectations and was the most enjoyable SCWC I have attended to date.

It turned out that the motel I was staying at during the conference was where all the authors and presenters for the conference were staying, and Friday morning at the continental breakfast there, I met Keith Scales, who has been artistic director for Shakespeare-in-the-Parks and the Classic Greek Theatre of Oregon, as well as an actor and director, and who has presented Chautauqua programs, but is now focusing on writing. Keith is a fascinating person to talk to and gave an excellent reading of his work-in-progress at the Friday night Authors’ Night.

I also met Rebecca Olson at the same continental breakfast. She is an associate editor from CALYX Journal, which is based in Corvallis, Oregon, and which “has been publishing the work of women writers and artists since 1976.” I later took a workshop (“A Fierce Brightness” about CALYX Journal and women’s writing) from Rebecca, who encouraged me to submit to the magazine.

After the continental breakfast, I took an all-day workshop called “Finding Your Voice” with Kim Griswell, who spent six years as coordinating editor of Highlights for Children. I had been a little concerned that perhaps the workshop might focus on children’s writing, but it was it was a general discussion of voice in writing, with many opportunities to write during the six hours. This was really the first intensive workshop I had taken. It involved a lot of writing and was an interesting experience. As a side note, one of things I noticed was that of the large group of people taking this workshop, only three were men. This is something that I have noticed at other conferences: it seems that women far outnumber men.

As the winner of the Bob Simons Scholarship Award, I was invited to attend the dinner held on Friday evening for the authors who were presenting workshops at the conference the next day. I met one of my favorite authors, Dennis Powers, in the buffet line. When he discovered who I was, he was very excited to meet me. He had read my February 1st posting and was very impressed with my having won the Bob Simons Scholarship Award and with my winning poem and my two others published in Rogue River Echoes, all of which he had read. He encouraged me to continue writing and took my contact information so he could send me a copy of his forthcoming book, Tales of the Seven Seas: the Escapades of Captain Dynamite Johnny O'Brien. After the Author’s Night readings, I purchased a copy of his Taking the Sea: Perilous Waters, Sunken Ships, and the True Story of the Legendary Wrecker Captains, in which he most kindly wrote a personal inscription. On Saturday I took a very good workshop from him on “Living the Writer’s Life.” It was really a thrill to meet one of my favorite writers.

Another of my favorite writers, John Daniel, was the Keynote Speaker for the Author’s Night held shortly after the dinner at another location. After the keynote and the author readings, I approached John to ask how I could find a copy of All Things Touched by Wind, one of his books of poetry, which I had only been able to find on line at outrageous collectible prices. John was kind enough to offer that he had some copies at home and would be pleased to sell me a copy at the original price. (Shortly after the conference, he mailed the book with a personalized inscription.) I took John’s very well-attended workshop on “Finding and Shaping the Language of Memory” on Saturday.

This was a year when great snow storms blanketed the east coast and caused several cancellations by presenters, forcing me to choose some alternate workshops from what I had originally planned. One of the alternate workshops I attended was Linda Barnes’ “Famous Next Week,” about how to make a chapbook, which turned out to be extremely interesting, especially as my success with my poetry in relationship to the conference had gotten me thinking that perhaps I should focus more on writing poetry.

If you live near Gold Beach, Oregon or are willing to make a trip there, I highly recommend this conference. Its average attendance is about 100, and it is not only educational and inspiring, it is also a lot of fun and a chance to meet other writers, aspiring and published. The 2011 SCWC takes place in only two weeks, on February 18th & 19th.

Validation

I was already excited about attending the 2010 South Coast Writers Conference.

John Daniel, author of Rogue River Journal: a Winter Alone (which won a 2006 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award), Looking After: a Son’s Memoir (winner of the 1997 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction), and the new and highly-praised The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature, is going to be the keynote speaker at Friday night's Author's Night readings. In addition, I will be taking a workshop from him on Saturday.

Another Oregon writer (Daniel lives in Oregon's Coast Range), Dennis Powers, a resident of Ashland, who wrote the suspenseful, but factual account of the 1964 Crescent City tsunami The Raging Sea: The Powerful Account of the Worst Tsunami in U.S. History, and has written a number of nautically-themed books including Sentinel of the Seas: Life and Death at the Most Dangerous Lighthouse Ever Built, about the building of St. George's Reef Lighthouse off the northern California Coast, is also going to be a presenter. I am signed up for his Saturday workshop as well. Being able to meet and take workshops from not one, but two authors whose work I already know and enjoy was exciting enough, or so I thought.

But things started getting even more exciting on Friday, when I received an e-mail that I was the winner of the 2010 Bob Simon Scholarship Award for my submission "Paper Ephemera," a poem I wrote in early January. Winning the scholarship pays for my Saturday workshops and a ticket to the Saturday fish fry. It's worth about $71, but what's really exciting is how validated I feel as a writer that my poem was chosen as the best of the submissions, particularly because I have not really looked at myself as a poet.

The poem was actually a quick write, but required a number of revisions until I was truly happy with it. The prompt given was “quiet victories, silent joys,” which I incorporated into the poem itself. The inspiration came from the fact that lately I have been working on two projects - my postcard collection and re-organizing all my 35 mm negatives from something like the last 30 years. (I've had a digital camera for the last couple of years.) The title was the last thing I chose. (See below to read “Paper Ephemera.”)

I was still excited about the win when I got another e-mail on Saturday from the conference organizers saying that two of the poems I had submitted last summer were going to be published in the 2009 Rogue River Echoes, the conference's journal.

While I had submitted essays to the scholarship award competition in the past – this was only my third try, however - I had never submitted anything  for publication in Rogue River Echoes, so I was especially pleased to have two of my poems published on my initial attempt.

Those two poems - "Longing" and "Cliff" - were written after the conference and during the Writer's Digest's "Poetic Asides" website during their 2009 April Poem-a-Day Challenge in celebration of National Poetry Month. And the only reason I was participating in that was because of having met and taken workshops from poet (also memoirist and novelist) Floyd Skloot at the 2009 South Coast Writers Workshop. (See my posting on the 2009 SCWW and Floyd Skloot. See below to read “Longing” and “Cliff.”)

Skloot, whose poetry is very accessible, and who describes himself as a lyric poet, made me feel that there was a place for the kind of poetry I wanted to write and that perhaps I should attempt the Poem-a-Day Challenge. I certainly can see the improvement I’ve made as a result of the practice of writing from prompts for 30 days straight.

This is the first validation I’ve received that my poetry has merit, and I am gratified, encouraged, and, yes – excited!

                                                                                                                    Paper Ephemera

It is all there in the photo albums
and the postcard books:
the people, places, and things
that have made up my life.

If they could, each picture,
each card, would tell
its story in more depth,
but they cannot speak,
cannot reveal what lies behind
the surface of their silence.

No one but I
can tell those stories.

They will die with me,
taking with them the love,
the laughter, the beauty,
the excitement, discovery, and hope,
along with the all challenges,
changes, and choices of
one woman’s lifetime -
the quiet victories, the silent joys,
and moments of peace
that only I could recount.

Gone, too, will be the fears,
the failures, the heartbreaks,
the confusions, betrayals, and
disappointments – the quiet losses,
the silent sorrows of a life
that was not always so well-lived
as those photos and postcards
would suggest.

Though the artifacts remain,
the memories will be gone,
and these painstakingly
preserved records of my life
will become nothing more
than meaningless scraps
of glossy paper.

by Carol Berger

 

 

                                               

South Coast Writers Conference 2009

This weekend I went to the 14th Annual South Coast Writers Conference in Gold Beach, Oregon. It was the third time I had attended the conference since I moved to nearby Port Orford four years ago. And it turned out to be the best one, as far as I was concerned, despite my initial lack of excitement at the workshops being offered.

What made the difference was discovering Floyd Skloot!

As a journalist/essayist/non-fiction writer, I am always off-put by the emphasis that seems to be placed on fiction, science fiction, poetry, humor, and children’s books in the conference. So initially I had a hard time finding three workshops I had enthusiasm for, much less four, when I registered weeks ahead of the event.

In what would turn out to be a fortuitous choice, I chose two workshops by a writer I had never heard of, Skloot – “Working with Fragments of Memory” and “Formal and Free: cultivating flexibility in the approach to poetry ” – and “Writing in Nature” by Robin Cody, both Oregon writers. I didn’t even choose a workshop for the fourth session, and none of the all-day intensive Friday workshops interested me enough for me to justify the time and money involved.

About three weeks before the conference, I went on line at the conference website to see if there was any updated information. I found a recommended reading list of books for each presenter and decided I’d read some of Floyd Skloot’s books, seeing as I would have two workshops with him. I found four memoirs and a book of poetry at the library and checked them all out. It was in reading these books that I found out who Skloot is, that he has been widely published and received many awards and much critical acclaim, and that I began my addiction to Floyd Skloot’s writing. And I became very excited about going to a conference where I would be able to meet and listen to him in person.

On December 7th, 1988, Skloot, who had at that point written novels and poetry, contracted a brain virus that left him with almost no memory and with significant physical impairments. His memoirs (The Night Side: Chronic fatigue syndrome and the illness experience, In the Shadow of Memory, A World of Light, and The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life) chronicle his now 20-year journey of learning to compensate for the damage done, to live with his limitations, and to amazingly successfully re-invent his life. He has painstakingly reconstructed the first 41 years of his life and turned it into a series of fascinating essays that are not only auto-biographical, but examine the concept of memory, the idea of family, the issue of self-identity, and most of all, how to live life to its fullest no matter what may befall one.

His poetry takes much of its inspiration from his experiences in life and is some of the most accessible yet critically acclaimed poetry I have ever read. Too often, critically acclaimed poetry is a labyrinth of inaccessibility for even a college graduate to make real sense of or to care about what’s being said. But Skloot’s poetry is full of feeling, as well as superb technique. I, who hadn’t read poetry in the more than forty years since I graduated from college (despite writing an occasional poem in response to an event in my life that I felt a need to record in some manner), found myself gobbling up poem after poem from The End of Dreams.

By the time I had finished three of the four memoirs – I am just now finishing the last – and read The End of Dreams, I felt I knew Floyd Skloot, though I had never met him. So it was no surprise when, at the Friday night author reading, I recognized him immediately as he walked by and set up a table of his books for sale just a few feet from me.

One would never know think that Skloot is anything other than normal, unless he tells you about his affliction. He is articulate, intelligent, and funny. His reading of three of his poems was one of the best of the evening, full of finesse and feeling. I found the next day in the two workshops I took from him that he is an excellent teacher as well. By the time the conference was over, I had purchased all four memoirs and The End of Dreams, plus his latest volumes of poetry, The Snow’s Music and Floyd Skloot: Selected Poems: 1970-2005, and the older Approximately Paradise.

Cody’s workshop was not about nature writing per se, but how to use nature in writing. He led the class through a number of exercises that used a place in nature as a starting point for the writing. Cody is also a very good teacher. Like Skloot, he resides in Oregon, although Cody is a native. His book Voyage of a Summer Sun - Canoeing the Columbia River, relating his experiences canoeing the length of the Columbia River solo, won the 1996 Oregon Book Award and is well worth reading.

I was having an excellent time at the conference, and although I had planned to leave early to be elsewhere, I decided to stay for the fourth and final workshop, choosing to attend Lori Ries’ “Come Play with Me,” on writing children’s picture books. I was feeling adventurous and figured I’d find out about an area of writing I had never even considered. Ries’s presentation was well-organized and thorough, and I left feeling as if I could write a children’s picture book. (Most publishing companies provide the illustrator, which lets me off the hook!)

It was amazing to see so many talented writers from Oregon and especially so many who had received awards and other recognition for their work. I felt particularly fortunate to have attended this conference. Wannabee is not sure she will still be residing close enough to attend next year’s conference, but if she is, she surely will.

See my category “Writer’s Conferences” in the left margin for a link to my posting on the 2008 conference. Also see my link to the South Coast Writers Conference website under “Helpful Links” for more information. The 15th Annual SCWC will be held February 12-13, 2010.

South Coast Writers Conference 2008

This weekend I went to the 13th Annual South Coast Writers Conference in Gold Beach, Oregon. The conference, sponsored by Southwestern Oregon Community College, starts on Friday morning and runs through Saturday evening.

On Friday attendees can choose from several all-day workshops. The one I attended was on setting up your own website, and I am pleased to say that I am now writing this on the website I set up! There is a LOT to learn – I feel like we only covered the tip of the iceberg. Our instructor, Jim Coffee, who I consider to be a computer “guru,” gave us a fascinating history of communication, showing how things evolved very slowly at first, but now are changing at practically warp speed in comparison.

He helped us set up TypePad websites and purchase domain names from Go Daddy. His patience with our many interruptions and in answering our questions was amazing. He recommended Google as a resource to help us in completing our site set-up, as well as a book: Blogging for Dummies. Over the next few days or weeks, I will be working on setting up more sidebar information, so keep watching for that.

Friday night I went to Authors’ Night, where some of the conference presenters read from their own works. This event is open to the public, as well as conference attendees. There was a LOT more people there than I had expected, as it turned out that David Oliver Relin, the author of the New York Times best-seller Three Cups of Tea, was the keynote speaker and quite a draw. After a break, about ten other authors read.

Saturday I took four workshops, all excellent. Two different ones by Sally Harrold, were on writing memoir and focused on the elements of scenes, summary, and musing; Harrold teaches autobiography classes at Southwestern Oregon Community College and recommended a good book for beginning memoir writers to read: Modern American Memoirs by Annie Dillard and Cort Conley. One workshop was by Sue Fagalde Lick (author of Freelancing for Newspapers: Writing for an Overlooked Market, and Stories Grandma Never Told: Portuguese Women in California) on how to get started freelancing for newspapers and what you need to know as a beginner. Another was by Jayel Gibson, author of the Ancient Mirrors fantasy series, who discussed the universal set of elements in a good story.

Each workshop lasts an hour and a half, with 15-minute breaks between them and a longer break for lunch. Six workshops are scheduled for each time slot, and they usually don’t repeat, so it can be difficult to choose just one four! Other presenters this year included Larry Brooks, Ann Cameron, Se-ah-dom-Edmo, Phil Hahn, Jessica Bryan, Dan Frechette, Rory Miller, and Sylvia Tohill.

Not only did I have a great time and learn new things, I started two different short memoirs that I plan to continue. I was also fortunate to win a door prize of a bundle of Rogue River Echoes, a collection of writings from conference attendees that the conference publishes each year.

Anyone interested in the South Coast Writers Conference can contact Janet Pretti at scwc@socc.edu or call 541-247-2741. It is held every President’s Day weekend on Friday and Saturday.