Mendocino Writers Blog

Community Connections

From Maureen Eppstein, MCWC Co-director

Last night, in the gracious lobby of the Stanford Inn in Mendocino, representatives of many of Mendocino County ’s arts organizations gathered to celebrate grant awards in the Community Foundation of Mendocino County’s Arts for our Future Program. These grants were made possible through funding from The James Irvine Foundation of San Francisco.

 It was my privilege to accept a substantial check on behalf of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference (MCWC). These funds will help us make the transition to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, to strengthen our board with collaborative training with the Mendocino Film Festival, and to increase our visibility through collaboration with youth service organizations and the California Poets in the Community.

 As I mingled, I was struck by how interconnected local arts, business, and social service organizations have become. The Arts Council of Mendocino County received funding for a huge collaborative website project that will link participating organizations and artists. Visit Mendocino County, Inc., a promotional alliance, is working to boost the local economy by identifying the Mendocino Coast as an arts destination. MCWC’s grant-funded community outreach project involve a large number of partners. We funded a poetry slam workshop for at-risk kids through the Mendocino County Youth Project. We’re helping Big Brothers Big Sisters keep their after school art and cooking classes alive while we work with the City of Fort Bragg to find space to add a writing workshop component. Safe Passage, Cancer Resource Center, Coast Community Library and South Coast Senior Center will partner in writing workshops for adults whose stories need to be heard.

 It’s exciting and humbling to be part of an undertaking so big and so important, and to realize that as writers we can make a difference.  

News from Maya Khosla

Maya Khosla (Mendocino Coast Writers Conference presenter 2007, participant 2008) sends this news from India. A message of renewal at the turning of the year.

Of Flight And Healing

This morning a peacock flew over my studio; yesterday, three alighted on the roof. I heard their rush of chestnut wings. I heard the slam-and-echo, their claws against baked clay tiles, their catcalls. Displaced yellow leaves twirled past my window. I felt flightless, immobilized, consumed by shadow. Forget about flight: I wanted the basics, one good foot in front of the other.

It’s my sixth week in a cast extending from the base of my right knee to my toes. I’ve been hobbling from room to room with army-style crutches of steel, underarm handles encased in cotton wool, wrapped with cloth and fastened tight with duct tape. I’ve been sitting feet-up.

An invalid’s windows become world. Out there, tailor birds, tree pies, yellow-footed green pigeons, flame-backed woodpeckers, jackals and occasional blue deer come in search of cover, insect and berry. They move on. The living world is all muscular roil and roll. Nothing can compare with the luxury of fluid movement.

My last fluid movement was a sprint for a low black ball flying toward the wall of a squash court. ‘Pop,’ and I went down. Someone, my squash partner Rita or perhaps I myself, had slammed my right heel with a racquet. Except that I was wrong. No one had hit me.

Driving, she raced me past street cows, diesel-pumping buses, women weaving through traffic in small scooters, their long scarves tied to avoid entanglement with spinning wheels. We pulled up at the front gate of the Indian Spinal Injuries Center, which also deals with hurt knees, feet and arms. A uniformed security guard handed us a pink parking slip. Two hours after X-rays and MRI scans, Dr. Chawla, a young surgeon with a lab coat and a neat side parting, pronounced it a complete tear. One of my body’s two strongest rubber bands, the right Achilles tendon, had snapped.

A week later, I donned a blue hospital tunic front-to-back and Dr. Chawla stitched up my rubber band. “No weight on this foot for six weeks,” he announced when I awoke from the two-hour operation with a throat of sandpaper.

Blood tests, anesthesia, stitches, my single room and three day’s bland hospital food came to a little under $1500—without health insurance. That, my sister Anjali and Rita agreed, was the reason it was best I ‘broke my foot’ in New Delhi, India, and not in the United States, where I live. Plus I had them. It was true: they poured mugs full of water over my head and softened the tops of my new crutches with cotton wool. And wheeled me out.

Healing is the longest phase of illness. Windows become blown-up photographs, documentary films, world. One window looks out on a corridor of trees. Three others overlook a jungle where understory and top canopy blend together.

Scene replaces scene and none is for keeps. Parakeets turn the sky into a wheel of green. Babblers turn a patch of earth into a trembling, feather-preening ball of fluff. Sunbirds flicker, warblers twitch, Oriental white-eyes flit in flocks like organized sparks. Feathered forelimbs swirl and flash. With all this swinging, swirling movement, I have to practically hang on to the arms of my chair to stop myself from falling forward. Locomotion is the simplest output produced by a wildly complex set of muscles in collaboration. I will walk again. Even dance.

It’s my seventh week and the cast is off. The cold season has arrived. I’m walking without crutches for the first time. My movement is all jerk and sway, arms held out as if I’m inside a rickety cabin on a speeding train instead of outside on solid ground.

“Focus inward,” I re-hear the voice of Thu, a Vietnamese yoga teacher who taught in the morning. “If your mind wanders, gently bring it back to breathing and movement.”

I take a deep draught of air and lurch forward. Ahead, a flycatcher swoops and arcs back up to its perch behind a shifting screen of bamboo leaves. I step forward and raise my binoculars. Circle and back, circle and back: it repeats the loop, scooping up insects.

By night, my windows are still as stone. Earth hurls through space. By dawn, stone has burst into a thousand wings. The sun breaks through and its leafy echoes, its million imitations, reach up with faces of gold, lime-green and jade. Witnessing a miracle in the making, surely any beholder can shake free of shackles. Already my amble flows smoother everyday. Surely anyone worn and injured can be made new.

2010 MCWC Conference Schedule

The schedule for the 2010 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference is now posted on the MCWC website. This schedule is still somewhat incomplete because the presenters in some cases still need to provide their workshop descriptions to us. However, this schedule will be updated regularly as new details are finalized.

Also the website contains information on the excellent presenters who will be taking part in the 2010 conference. This information can be found on the website faculty page.

Christmas Dawn by Katherine Heiman Brown

    I had climbed upon my father’s empty chair, which was normally “hands-off,” and pushed my 6-year-old self against the seat back like a queen. I sensed I belonged there on that 1960s Christmas morning. The coo-coo clock coo-cooed six times, but it remained dark outside. And birdless. My mother told my two older brothers, older sister, and I not to disturb her until at least 7. “And for God’s sake, don’t wake the baby.”
    I had already been to the tree and found my red felt stocking with the missing jingle bell, my name, Kathy, stitched in crooked white yarn letters across the top. The stocking marked my area of four or five unwrapped gifts, spread out with their cellophane box tops. I did not receive the Chutes and Ladders game I had seen on television, or a doll with long, blond hair that I could braid. Instead, I received a rubber baby with unbendable arms and legs, her hair short, black, curly and unbrushable. She did not have eyelids. She could not even wet herself.
My brothers tiptoed into the room and looked for their stockings, but I did not stir. I was busy thinking.
    The evening before I had been to my neighbor friend Judy’s house, where she showed me their front room crowded with colorful boxes, delicious in themselves with their cherry red bows and patterned paper. I had never seen so many presents. Her Christmas tree was green, a real one that drank water from its stand and smelled like a cedar chest. Our tree was fake, the silver branch tips curled by my father with his pocket knife. He made us leave when he worked on the tree. We got in the way.
    “We’re going to have our Christmas now,” Judy’s mother had told me as the family began to gather. Judy’s older sister, Rosella, put on a Christmas album. Judy’s father patted my head. I loved how his eyes twinkled all the time, as if he were holding in a joke.
    “You better get on home,” Judy’s mother said. The family turned my way, but I could not move. It was all too beautiful.
    “Judy, you be Santa’s helper.” Her father smiled, letting all his white teeth show.
    “I’m sure your mother wants you at home,” Judy’s mother said again, her look stern. I moved off to the side.
    Judy placed a gift before one person and the entire family watched them unwrap it amidst oohs and aahs, like a happy story that seemed to go on for hours. Judy’s mother and older sisters frowned at me when I squealed over Judy’s presents. Judy got Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, a two-story dollhouse with a bajillion pieces of furniture, a tea set, a pretty nurse doll with long hair that you could braid, plus a bunch of clothes. Before I could help her try out her new toys, her mother shooed me out with instructions to come visit after the New Year.
    I wondered why Santa treated people differently. I kept replaying Judy’s Christmas as my brothers looked at their gifts and whispered appreciation. But not pride.
    Our presents gave me the same feeling I got from the Fish Pond game at the Knights of Columbus fair, where I paid a nickel to hold a fishing pole with a colored bucket hooked on the end of it. The attendant made me use the pole with the pink bucket and my brothers the pole with the blue one. I lowered the line so that the bucket disappeared behind a curtained booth, and a shiver of possibilities passed through me when I felt the string tug, a signal to pull the pole up again. I wanted a present plucked from the depth of my imagination. But the prize was always dumb: a plastic ring, a comb or a small coloring book. My brothers got yo-yos.
    If Santa received lists, why didn’t he pay attention? Why did some people, like Judy, get more than what they could possibly want, and others, like those starving kids from Africa on TV, get nothing? Seemed like he would at least bring starving kids some Cheerios or chicken noodle soup.
    I heard my mother’s slippers scuffle down the hall and pass the living room on the way to the kitchen, but I remained in my father’s chair and waited for the heater to clink on and drive out the chill. Cabinet doors opened and closed. The lid snapped off the coffee can.  
    Why was it that every Santa I had ever seen was fake, the elastic from their slobbery cotton beard’s showing? How could anyone believe in them?
    My mother came to the edge of the hallway and called out to my father. “The kids are up.” My brothers glanced at each other, all of us wondering if he would be in a good mood. Soon there would be breakfast and itchy clothes to put on for church.
    The quiet was leaving, my time in the chair over, but before I slid off, a shocking thought crept into my head. I looked at the cold aluminum tree and the lack of paper, ribbons and grins. And slowly, it made sense.
    There was no Santa Claus.

Katherine Heimann Brown is the executive co-director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference in California. She teaches English and creative writing at College of the Redwoods.

Ellen Sussman celebrates

This just in from Ellen Sussman, one of the workshop leaders at our 2010 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference:
 
"I just got great news -- my novel FRENCH LESSONS was bought by Ballantine! I'm in NY celebrating -- there was a two day auction -- 6 publishers bidding on the novel!! -- and in the end I chose Ballantine's two book deal. I'm out of my mind excited."

Ellen read an excerpt from FRENCH LESSONS at her Soundings reading in Fort Bragg last year.

Encore of Ben Percy's Speech

Remember that inspiring and hilarious speech Ben Percy gave at the closing dinner of this summer's Mendocino Coast Writers Conference? Poets & Writers Magazine has printed it in their November/December issue. Titled Go the Distance: What Rocky Taught Me About Submission, it tells us how to apply the persistence, discipline, and heart that fuels the practice of writing to the process of submission. Well worth a second round.

October 2009 Newsletter

The Mendocino Coast Writers Conference newsletter for October 2009 has just been added to the conference website. You can reach it at www.mcwc.org . This link also gives you access to an archive of all the previous conference newsletters.

Feeding Strays--Short Story Collection by Stefanie Freele

"Feeding Strays" - A Short Story Collection by Stefanie Freele (Lost Horse Press) is now available.

Back Cover:A woman hides from her husband in a fish tank and another absently bakes sponges inside her tarts. Appliances drop from the sky, men grapple with chainsaws, women struggle with hormonal violence, and abandoned boys beg on doorsteps. Enter into the territory of broken people and the folks that love them.
Sensitive and unruly, sincere and absurd, Stefanie Freele's "Feeding Strays" is a collection of fifty short stories, both slipstream and modern, about children, family, relationships, and oysters.

As its title suggests, Feeding Strays is a deeply compassionate collection. Stefanie Freele has a knack for capturing stray moments in her characters' lives -- moments most writers would overlook -- and charging them with a strange and wondrous grace. These stories will unsettle you, inspire you, and make you feel part of the greater human family.
-- Gayle Brandeis, author of the Bellweather Prize-winning The Book Of Dead Birds, Fruitflesh, and Self Storage

How I love the stories of Stefanie Freele for their endless surprises, their lemon-tart humor, their beautiful-ugly characters. I'm not always certain how she accomplishes her magic -- her stories as quick as a shell game -- but I am certain that you will set down this book as I did, with a hurt heart and a curious smile.
-- Benjamin Percy, author of Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk

To order Feeding Strays:

http://www.stefaniefreele.com/id25.html

Also, copies of "Feeding Strays" will be available at the Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino. A reading & book signing will be held on Friday October 30th at the Gallery Bookshop at 6:30.

 

Ellen Bass list proves useful

Connie Crawford, a 2009 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference participant, writes:

A letter was waiting for me when I got back from the conference: a poem of mine is accepted for publication in an anthology by Sixteen Rivers Press! It's the first poem I have sent out. I am thrilled. The 16 rivers in the press name refers to the 16 rivers of the San Francisco Bay watershed.  The book will contain about 100 poems, with an introduction by Robert Hass  It will be out next spring. I learned of the contest via Ellen Bass' excellent email list of opportunities for poets which she keeps remarkably up to date and useful.

Glowing Evaluations for Mendocino Coast Writers Conference

“The best conference I’ve attended. The format allowed indepth work and learning that spiraled and connected ideas.” 

“Impeccably organized and extremely worthwhile.”

“I gained so much! Next time I’ll recruit my writing group to attend.”

 

These enthusiastic comments are typical of the evaluations received from the 2009 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. We learned that MCWC participants are committed writers. The most important things they gained were good writing advice, a sense of being part of a supportive community of writers,  and encouragement for their work.

 

As we prepare for the 2010 conference, we know that the words of this year’s participants, either in person or through online social networks, will persuade others to come. By a huge majority, participants came in 2009 because they, or someone they knew, had a great experience at MCWC in a previous year. Participants particularly liked MCWC’s program format. Meeting in a small group with the same faculty member for three consecutive mornings built bonds of friendship, while afternoons devoted to readings, panels and lectures offered variety. Our cool climate and spectacular location were big draws too, as was the opportunity to work with outstanding teachers such as Ellen Bass, Ben Percy and Sharman Apt Russell.

 

Mark your calendars: dates for the 2010 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference are July 29 through July 31, 2010.