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.  

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.

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. 

Notes from the Conference Director, Charlotte Gullick

Make 2009 the year of Artistic Risks

I tend to avoid resolutions for a few reasons, but I do think they have their place, especially when it comes to carving out space in our lives for our dreams.  On the first day of 2008, I resolved to “take twenty risks on behalf of my artist.”  This small commitment to self came out of the fear that I was going to lose connection to my writer because of work, mothering, life, all the highly important stuff that calls louder than my writing projects.  On my computer, I kept track of what I submitted to where and to what contests I entered.  I’m pleased to share that two good things came from that resolution: I was named a finalist for the New Letters Award for Writers and I won a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship.  Neither accomplishment led directly to publication, but they bolstered my spirits and confirmed the notion that my writing is something I need to continue to pursue.  And, I didn’t reach my intended goal of twenty risks.  Instead, I only made it to seventeen, but my sense of artistic self was soothed, fed, graced by my having placed it as a priority.  So, in this new month of this new year, I encourage all writers to set goals for their writing.  Perhaps the risk might be to introduce yourself as a writer at the next party you go to.  Or you might ask yourself to write three hundreds every week day. 
By stretching what we imagine for ourselves, we make the space to enter it, both literally and figuratively.