Hello Everyone!

This page is for sharing “stuff” about your personal writing life — a place where you can feel a little more connected to the community of writers who have found there way to the Writing Salon.

We welcome (from Writing Salon teachers OR students — current or past) any tidbits or updates you’d like to send re: what’s going on in your personal writing life.What have you been up to? What has inspired you recently? What are your goals? What are you doing to achieve them? What are you currently working on? Got anything published lately? Have any new thoughts or insights about writing in general…or yours in particular? Made any exciting breakthroughs?  Discovered a writing exercise that you love? Or a book? Or a particular writer? If you’d like to add your two cents’ worth to this little “community forum,” send it in an email to jane@writingsalons.com. Length: 25 to 250 words.

• Nov. 15, 2009: This just in from our SF fiction workshop teacher Josh Mohr: Hi Jane, I got some crazy news courtesy of O Magazine yesterday: 10 Terrific Reads of 2009 — The books that gave us comfort, joy, and lots to talk about. #8: Some Things That Meant the World to Me, by Joshua Mohr: “Meet Rhonda, a man who spends his haunted, liquor-fueled days dumpster-diving for redemption. With his first line, “I’d like to brag about the night I saved a hooker’s life,” debut writer Joshua Mohr sucks you into Some Things That Meant the World to Me. Charles Bukowski fans will dig the grit in this seedy novel, a poetic  rendering of postmodern San Francisco culminating in, of all places, Home Depot.”

• October 15, 2009: Hi Jane, remember my piece from last spring’s Round Robin on not feeling the earthquake, and on alienation? I turned it into a two minute essay — and it’ll be airing on KQED Perspectives tomorrow at 6:06am, 7:35am and 11:30pm. It’ll also be available in the Perspectives archives, http://www.kqed.org/radio/programs/perspectives/  and featured in a special earthquake section of the website. I also wanted to say thanks to you and others in that final Round Robin class for helping me find the essence of that piece! (Perhaps you can post this on the “what’s up with your writing life” section?) — Isobel White (former Round Robin student, currently signed up for our Berkeley fiction class)

• May 11, 2009: This week I will graduate from Dominican University of California with an MA in Humanities with focus in creative writing. Additionally, I was delighted to have an essay published in the Morning News last week. You’ll find it at www.themorningnews.org.  If you’re not already familiar with TMN, I recommend it to you; they always have something fun to read. Maybe the next one will be something by you.   –Kari Kiernan (periodic WS student, personal essay classes and misc. others)

• March 29, 2009: I have a book of poems coming out sometime this year. It’s called Wednesday after Lunch. It won the Blue Light Press ms. competition for 2008. It has a fabulous photo of a colorful Bernal Heights staircase on the cover, the work of promising photographer Jane Underwood. It has glowing blurbs from Marie Howe, Gail Mazur, Peter Money, and Thea Sullivan, and some pretty dang good work in it, if I do say so myself, including several poems workshopped at The Writing Salon some years back and one written in The Writing Salon’s most recent Round Robin Daily Write class (a late addition). It covers all of human history, more or less, and several human emotional states, including love, grief, and feeling good about stepping out on a Friday night. — Will Walker (longtime WS student – personal essays, poetry, & Round Robin classes)

• March 19, 2009: I’m one summer away from completing my MFA in Creative Writing at USF, which involves producing a book-length collection of essays. Additionally, I have recently published essays in The SF Chronicle Magazine, Common Ground, and the social-service anthology The Social Cause Diet. I’m grateful to my Writing Salon teachers — Thea, Alison, and Susie — for helping guide my entry into this crazy, wonderful literary world! — Chris Malcomb

• Feb. 19th, 2009: It’s been a while since I last took a class at the Writing Salon but I still remember some of the great pointers I got from Janis Cooke Newman on how to get published. For a while I landed some really cool gigs, from the Bay Guardian to Sail Magazine to the SF Chronicle, but then I got a job selling bamboo, and the writing dried up a bit. As a musician, I’m used to the struggles of getting your art out there, and I actually welcome little creative breaks to just soak in life for a while. Now I’m back full force — I published Dancing on the Brink of the World, a book of 12 short stories, paintings and songs for each of the signs of the zodiac, through the creative web portal at www.tubercreations.com. Got myself a little office space in the Mission and I’m working on a bunch of new stories and essays — woohoo! See you at a workshop soon. —Sven Eberlein

• Feb. 13th, 2009: I recently published an online space for flash fiction, www.curlyredstories.com, as a continuation of my passion for the subject of design in fiction, which was the basis of my MFA thesis. Having just returned to California from my adventures in travel and writing, I took Josh Mohr’s Flash Fiction workshop, and that class ignited my craving for a writers community and also to learn more about the art of writing in a limited space. As a Flamenco dancer, I’m fascinated by what can be created in small spaces. The gypsies knew a thing or two about it. In creating Curly Red Stories, my desires are being satisfied. I was so thrilled that we were able to include Josh’s piece “Our Skies,” along with his scintillating interview, that I’m considering adding podcast interviews in the future. I DO need some short fiction submissions for March. Please check out Curly Red Stories, have a good read, and see if it might be something you’d be interested in submitting to. We don’t want Josh to hog the space for another month, do we? — Niya C. Sisk (WS student, fiction)

• Feb. 9, 2009: After I took Eric Maisel’s class on crafting a book proposal several years ago, the first agent to whom I spoke placed the book in her to-be-considered pile.  Years passed and it because clear that she was considering many more projects than she could represent.  I updated everything — still using Maisel’s template — and contacted a second agent.  After an auction last June, the book sold to Scribner based on the strength of the proposal.  “Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues” will be out in October 2009!  It contains 40 personal essays,  two of which are by other Writing Salon alumni. — Loren Rhoads (WS student, took her first class here years ago and is currently enrolled in the Round Robin class)

• Feb. 6, 2009: My next book, See How We Almost Fly, won a poetry contest and will be published by Pearl Editions, I hope sometime this year.  If not this year, then next. Whoo-hoo!!  Champagne tonight!! —Alison Luterman (teacher, Personal Essays Workshop and sometimes poetry, too)

• Jan. 26, 2009: I’m working on a non-fiction book proposal, for book number three. It’s funny to realize that the advice I give students and clients is also advice I must take myself. I’m wrestling with the three main questions from agents I always lay out in class: Why you? Why this book now? And who cares? The first question is easy to answer because this is a story about my aunt and her family, and I’m the family historian and writer. The second is harder because the book is about the past, yet it must be tied into current events to make it relevant. So if I was writing a story about how someone rose above an economic downturn, no problem. The third…I don’t have an answer yet. I have new compassion for my students. This stuff is a challenge, but I know my book will be more focused and I will have a better chance at acceptance if I can get to the bottom of these two questions. —Dianne Jacob (teacher, “Writing Your Book Proposal“; “Food Writing”)

• Jan. 26, 2009: I am herding cats, trying to shape a third book of poems.  I have plenty of new work, so this should be a cake-walk, but the week-by-week engagement with the Writing Salon class has kept me fresh, kept me writing new material when I expected to be wrapping things up. Recent work is forthcoming in The New Yorker and elsewhere, but I keep going, starting new things. Is this a complaint? Not! —Julie Bruck (teacher, “Fearless Poetry Workshop”)

• Jan. 26, 2009: I just completed final edits on my second novel, Another Life Altogether.  It is now slated for publication in February 2010 with Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House.  In late December I returned from a research trip to England for the new novel I’m working on which is set during and after WWII in the deep-sea trawling community in the East Yorkshire city of Hull. I’m also working on a children’s book—a fantasy involving Stonehenge, an evil real estate developer, and magic.  — Elaine Beale (teacher, “Busting through Writer’s Block”)

• Jan. 21, 2009: My piece “Birds of a Feather” won First Prize in the 2008 Soul-Making Literary Competition flash fiction category. A free public reading of winning pieces in 11 categories is scheduled for Sunday, March 22 at the San Francisco Main Library Koret Auditorium. For more info about the event and the 2009 contest, visit www.soulmakingcontest.us.  I’ll also be moderating a panel discussion, “Launching Your Writing: Savvy Strategies to Promote Your Work” at the Women on Writing (WOW) Conference Saturday, March 7 at Skyline College in San Bruno.  —from Kathleen McClung (teacher, Memoir Writing and Writing as Healing)

• Jan. 21, 2009: I’m working on a series of prose poems–or maybe it’s a poetic essay–called “Love Shack.”  It’s about mid-life relationship.  And shuffling poems around in the poetry manuscript I’ve been working on for eight years, adding new poems, subtracting old ones, re-ordering, sending it out to contests…and I’m revising a play I wrote last year called Shame Circus.  Lots of revision, revision, revision. —from Alison Luterman (teacher, Personal Essays Workshop and sometimes poetry, too)

• Jan. 21: 2009: In keeping with my resolution to finish my novel before I turn 40 (okay 41 now) I’ve received a new reason to keep going. An adaptation of my chapter “Mexican Rain” will be included in the upcoming “Best Women’s Travel Writing 2009″ (Traveler’s Tales). On bad days you think you’re writing is pointless and no one will ever read it, and then amidst slews of rejection something extraordinary happens–someone decides to publish something- and you think Yes. I knew it. I am a writer after all. Then there are the people who allowed you to believe in yourself: my great mentor, Writing Salon veteran teacher Linda Watanabe McFerrin, will be hosting a reading/book launch on March 14 with Left Coast Writers. Details will be on my website: www.pamelaalmabass.com. — from Pamela Alma Bass (teacher, Humor Writing)

• Jan. 21: 2009: After publishing a collection of stories in November and deciding, after four years, I’m done with my novel, I’ve started something new for the first time in two years. It’s a new voice (no more teenagers! No more depressive marrieds!), and the structure allows me to write about many things I’ve been interested in lately: memory, truth, reality, relationships, science, community, San Francisco, biology, sex. Or maybe it’s just goulash. I like goulash. I’ll be at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, all of April working on my goulash in a small room with a comfortable bed and a nook for wine and chocolate. Thank god for residencies. — from Jenny Pritchett (teacher, Intro to Creative Writing)