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This very small but very interconnected town is crawling with writers. There are enough of us that we made the local paper’s year-end roundup. It’s incredibly nice to live in a place where the work one does is valued.
Here’s the excerpt about island writers:
Written on the island
Steadily documenting the work of Bainbridge authors over the course of a year is pure pleasure for a reader and writer. Seeing them compiled into a single “year in review” entry is jaw dropping.
Whether your drool is awe- or envy-inspired, wipe it off and get to the library or bookstore.
Fiction ran the gamut, from juicy to literary. Kristin Hannah glowed with “Firefly Lane,” Susan Wiggs gave us “Just Breathe,” and Carol Cassella provided the remedy with “Oxygen.” Meanwhile, Judith Reynolds Brown celebrated a “Turkish Wedding,” Anthony Flacco came out of the woodwork with “The Hidden Man,” Jonathan Evison explored familial (dys)function in “All About Lulu,” and David Guterson took us into the backwoods while examining the duality of manhood in “The Other.”
In verse, MacArthur Award winning poet Linda Bierds published “Flight: New and Selected Poems.”
History and biography scored. Mary Woodward published “In Defense of Our Neighbors: The Walt and Milly Woodward Story.”
Ann Gowen Combs and her brother, Geoffrey Gowen, documented another island legend and father with “Sunrise to Sunrise: Vincent Gowen’s Memoirs.” Michael Lisagor turned his “Romancing the Buddha” into a one-man stage play.
Gary White turned 30 years’ worth of passionate research into “The Hall Brothers Shipbuilders.” Wilkes Elementary School teacher Warren Read explored his family’s history of racism in “The Lyncher in Me.” And Richard LeMieux documented his years of homelessness in “Breakfast at Sally’s.”
(These last two, while not technically island residents, made the “island” cut by virtue of proximity as well as worth.)
In photography and how-to, a pair of Kathleens, O’Brien and Smith, published “The Green Home Primer,” a design-focused guide to creating an environmentally sound domicile. Michael Diehl made churn visually fascinating with “Crossings: On the Ferries of Puget Sound.” And two women with a taste for the island raised funds for the Kitsap Humane Society with “Flavors of Bainbridge.”
Other nonfiction included “Evangelical vs. Liberal” by James Wellman and “Understanding Your Child’s Puzzling Behavior” by clinical psychologist Steven Curtis.
Which leads us to the kids. Suzanne Selfors followed last year’s “To Catch a Mermaid” with the young adult novel “Saving Juliet,” later adapted for the stage at BPA.
First-time author Andrea von Botefuhr gave us “The Land of Smaerd.” Julie Hall presented “A Hot Planet Needs Cool Kids,” while science/how-to fave Lynn Brunelle tackled shoe-tying with “The Zoo’s Shoes.”
Finally, George Shannon gets mention this year for “Rabbit’s Gift.” Though published in 2007, the charming winter-themed picture book, resonant on so many levels, earned a 2008 Washington State Book Award for children’s fiction.
*** CALENDAR ALERT ***SAVE THE DATE
WRITING IN THE GARDEN OF THE GODS
Field’s End Writers’ Conference 2008
WHO: This year’s line-up of authors and speakers includes: Roy Blount, Jr. (keynote speaker), Stephanie Kallos (opening speaker), Knute Berger, Alice Acheson, Lyall Bush, Laura Kalpakian, Thomas Kohnstamm, Rosina Lippi aka Sara Donati, Jennifer Louden, Nancy Pagh, George Shannon, Charley Pavlosky, Sheila Rabe aka Sheila Roberts, Suzanne Selfors, David Wagoner, and Timothy Egan (closing speaker). Professional actor Ron Milton will be on hand for the Page One sessions.
WHAT: Third annual Field’s End Writers’ Conference, “Writing in the Garden of the Gods.”
WHEN: Saturday, April 26, 2008
9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
WHERE: Kiana Lodge
14976 Sandy Hook Rd. NE
Poulsbo, WA 98370
DETAILS: This one-day conference, held at the spectacularly beautiful Kiana Lodge near Bainbridge Island, is a combination of lectures and breakout sessions presented by an eclectic group of people in the literary world.
The day offers three groupings of breakout sessions. Guests will select three workshops to attend according to their interest (literary fiction, poetry, nonfiction, screen writing, dialogue, genre, travel writing, editing, journalism, historical fiction, and commercial fiction). Each breakout session will also offer a Page One workshop, where conference guests can anonymously submit the first page of something they’ve written for possible live reading and critique by the guest authors.
Lunch is provided and there will be an early evening wine and cheese reception and book signing providing conference guests, authors, and speakers a chance to mingle. Shuttle buses will be available to carry walk-on ferry passengers to and from Kiana Lodge.
Registration begins February 1, 2008. Early registration is recommended as the conference is limited to 250 guests and has sold out in the past. Cost to attend is $135 if you register before February 28, 2008 and $150 after March 1, 2008. Groups of 5 or more can register for $130/person. To register for the 2008 Field’s End Writers’ Conference, visit http://www.fieldsend.org.
Founded in 2002, Field’s End is a writers’ community whose mission is to inspire writers and nurture the written word through lectures, workshops, and instruction in the art and craft of writing. Located across the Puget Sound from Seattle on beautiful Bainbridge Island, Field’s End is an affiliate of the nonprofit Bainbridge Public Library, which is located at 1270 Madison Avenue on Bainbridge Island. For more information, call (206) 842-4162 or visit http://www.fieldsend.org.
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Concept 2 Launch
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All right, grasshoppers, print this out because it’s going to save you all kinds of time and trouble. Oh, and money. How many times have you been asked to send in a photo, “300dpi” or better… Thus leading you on a hunt to a) figure out what 300 dpi is, whether or not your photos possess this elusive quality (probably not; right-click and select Properties and you’ll see) and c) how to get your hands on one without bugging your publisher’s PR rep yet again….
People will tell you that you have to have “Photoshop,” an expensive RAM-hog program, in order to edit your digital photos. You don’t. You just need to go to www.irfanview.com and download their swift little free program. To convert a shot to 300dpi, right-click the photo. Select “Open With” and then select Irfanview. On the menu bar, select Image–>Resize/Resample and in the box that comes up, change the DPI to 300. You might also want to reduce the size in pixels, too. Et voila! Your photo is ready for print.
In a place where most of the calls to police involve objects lost and found, disputes over hedge trimming and dogs behaving badly, this entry stands out:
My favorite part is in the middle, when one drunk pounds the other drunk’s face to get him to shut up so he can hear what the police are saying.
Also note–there are boats and extremely cold water involved. And dark of night. Anyone familiar with boating on Puget Sound is probably shuddering at this point. I suppose if you’re going to get trashed and do something stupid, you might as well go for broke.
Sometimes, when I’m looking for inspiration (or procrastinating), I type “ripped from the headlines” in Google and see what pops up. Sometimes you hit paydirt. I mean, c’mon! Pig-smuggling? What’s better than that?
As a fiction writer, I’m often trolling the newspaper for little tidbits of human interest that might find their way into a novel. I could never tell this story, though. This is one of those things that is just goes too far for fiction. If you read this scene in a novel, you’d never believe it.
Which is one thing that makes reading the police blotter so entertaining.
Heads up. Friday Night Lights just showed up on Sunday. Past episodes of this drama will re-air on Sundays, which is a great way to get hooked. 
I’m a very unlikely viewer for this show. I’m not a football fan and have managed to go through life without actually knowing the rules of the game. TV dramas about high school kids almost never work for me. This sounds like the last kind of program I’d tune into. It’s not about football the way Bull Durham is not about baseball.
I started watching Friday Night Lights because of a book. An amazingly good book–so good that, while reading it, I forgot that I don’t like or understand high school football. I found myself on the edge of my seat, invested in the characters and their storyline. I was interested to see how this lovely work of nonfiction would morph into a fictional TV drama.
My favorite parts–sharp, powerful character archetypes. The rebel, the princess, the hero and anti-hero, the bad girl, the good girl…They’re all beautifully portrayed. The women in this show get to be strong and smart and funny. That alone is enough to win my heart.
The View From Here 