writers conference

[Guest guest]

more about the fundraiser my sister is planning to raise awareness of mitochondrial disease and money for research. i have such a good sister (and 2 good brothers too). please spread the word about the conference to those who may live close enough and have an interest in writing. The line up of authors is amazing. anne juhlmann News Journal February 8, 2005 Section: Life & Leisure Page: E1,E2 Dewey writers conference merges urge to create with an urge to help By CHRISTOPHER YASIEJKO The News Journal Examine the schedule. Notice the credentials of the participating authors. Visit the conference's Web site. All elements indicate an established event orchestrated by an experienced planner. It's hard to imagine that one Rehoboth Beach woman concocted it in mid-October, then compelled 13 regional writers of varying genres to work for no pay. It all was born out of Maribeth Fischer's desire to fight a disease many have never heard about, a disease that isn't even her own. "Writers at the Beach: Pure Sea Glass," a day of readings, workshops and conversations scheduled for March 5 in Dewey Beach, is Fischer's way of using her passion for writing to help her nephews. Sam, 7, and Zachary, 12, have severe cases of mitochondrial disease, a disorder of energy metabolism that affects as many as one in 2,000 children. Fischer has spent a lot of time in Milwaukee, where the boys live. Once, when she returned to teach at the University of land-Baltimore County, she says, she "just didn't care." It wasn't that she had lost her zeal for the written word. Rather, she couldn't reconcile the bounding souls but threatened lives of her nephews with the idealistic love stories and King mimicry employed by her students. The two pursuits clashed in her mind. "I started searching for a way to connect writing to helping them," says Fischer, 40. "It was one of those things, when the idea came - I'm not sure why, I'm not sure how - I was 100 percent excited about it. "I'm loving what's happened." Fischer, a novelist and essayist who is among the authors participating in Writers at the Beach, had to hack through the peripherals that accompany incorporation. With the help of a small contingent of friends, she quickly learned about deadlines, publicity, sponsors and advertising. "It just wasn't ever a part of my world," says Fischer, who claims she'd never planned even a party. When selecting the writers, Fischer tried not to pick anyone more than a two- or three-hour drive away. She knew some of them. A few spread the word to colleagues. Fischer started with fiction writers, since she's one, and branched out to include writers of nonfiction and poetry. Fleda Brown, Delaware's poet laureate and a professor of English at the University of Delaware, will be among them. She marvels at the apparent flurry of activity in poetry downstate. "It seems to me that there's tremendous energy there," Brown says. She cites the Milton Poetry Festival, held each December in Milton, and the regular readings at Booksandcoffee, a bookstore in Dewey Beach. "This is just an example of how someone can take an idea and make it work on two levels, can combine what poets need and what writers need in the state with a serious charity need," Brown says. "It just seems to me that it's brilliant. And I really expect that years from now it'll be a festival that continues and grows." Fischer's goal is to draw 100 paying participants. So far, she says, enrollment is good. All proceeds from the $115-per-person fee will go to the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation. In each workshop, participants will explore a specific aspect of writing - generating poems, creating vivid characters, organizing a memoir, building character in the short story, or mining personal and factual stories for use in fiction. Each workshop will be limited to 12 participants. ('s poetry workshop is half-filled, and the others are about one-third filled.) Authors will lead three discussion groups from 2-3 p.m., and another three from 3-4 p.m. Topics of the first three panels include the inherent difficulties of writing about pain, grief and loss; the role of research and facts in fiction and the danger of using fictional techniques in nonfiction; and how to approach the unique subgenre of magazine journalism. The second set includes discussions about the sources of story ideas; the writer's responsibility to the story; and what it takes to live a writing life. Each discussion will be limited to 30 participants, although Fischer may consider adding a session if a topic generates enough interest. On the Web site (www.writersatthebeach.com), Fischer connects the conference to its beneficiary in a brief passage about her nephews. Her younger sister, Anne, has four children. All have mitochondrial disease. The two boys, however, are most severely affected. Fischer describes Sam following Zachary through the house on a spy mission, lugging behind him "all his infusion pumps and tubes that he shoves into a suitcase on wheels." Only her sister's words, Fischer says, can tell the story. Each week, Anne writes an entry in an online journal about her life with her children. She allowed Fischer to share three entries on the workshop's site; they were dated Dec. 31, 2003, and March 27 and June 14 of 2004. In the first entry, she mentions Sam's penchant for telling jokes that are funny only to him. His laughter is reason enough for family members to ask him to repeat his material. She marvels at the generosity of the strangers who donate the blood that becomes Sam's - "Who are these people that volunteer to give a part of themselves so that my child may live?" she writes - and acknowledges her boys' parallel fate as another child's Mito, as she calls it, eats away at his body. That night, Anne sat on the couch to read with Sam. He was cold, and she pulled a blanket over them. "A few minutes later," Anne writes, "someone else got under the blanket with us - Zachary. And there we were, just us three, reading and laughing and reading some more." Contact Yasiejko at 324-2778 or cyasiejko@.... IF YOU GO Writers at the Beach: Pure Sea Glass WHAT: Conference with all proceeds going to the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation WHEN: Saturday, March 5, 8:30 a.m.-7 p.m. WHERE: Crabber's Cove, Del. 1 at the bay, Ruddertowne, Dewey Beach COST: $115 INFORMATION: www.writersatthebeach.com, 841-2172, or Box 1326, Rehoboth Beach, DE 19971. THE LINEUP The conference lineup now includes: ¥ Sheri Reynolds, whose novel "The Rapture of Canaan" was an Oprah's Book Club selection and New York Times Bestseller ¥ O'Sullivan, a features editor at The Washingtonian magazine ¥ Debra Puglisi Sharp, author of "Shattered: Reclaiming a Life Torn Apart by Violence" ¥ Carolyn Parkhurst, whose novel "The Dogs of Babel" was a highlighted pick on NBC's "The Today Show" ¥ Brad Barkley, a novelist and short-story writer ¥ Liam Callanan, a novelist and a contributor to Slate, Forbes, and other magazines ¥ Novelist Pietrzyk ¥ Nonfiction naturalist Tom Horton ¥ Terry Plowman, editor and publisher of Delaware Beach Life magazine ¥ Poets Haley, and Fleda Brown. Copyright © The News Journal. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Gannett Co., Inc. by NewsBank, inc.

[Guest guest]

more about the fundraiser my sister is planning to raise awareness of mitochondrial disease and money for research. i have such a good sister (and 2 good brothers too). please spread the word about the conference to those who may live close enough and have an interest in writing. The line up of authors is amazing. anne juhlmann News Journal February 8, 2005 Section: Life & Leisure Page: E1,E2 Dewey writers conference merges urge to create with an urge to help By CHRISTOPHER YASIEJKO The News Journal Examine the schedule. Notice the credentials of the participating authors. Visit the conference's Web site. All elements indicate an established event orchestrated by an experienced planner. It's hard to imagine that one Rehoboth Beach woman concocted it in mid-October, then compelled 13 regional writers of varying genres to work for no pay. It all was born out of Maribeth Fischer's desire to fight a disease many have never heard about, a disease that isn't even her own. "Writers at the Beach: Pure Sea Glass," a day of readings, workshops and conversations scheduled for March 5 in Dewey Beach, is Fischer's way of using her passion for writing to help her nephews. Sam, 7, and Zachary, 12, have severe cases of mitochondrial disease, a disorder of energy metabolism that affects as many as one in 2,000 children. Fischer has spent a lot of time in Milwaukee, where the boys live. Once, when she returned to teach at the University of land-Baltimore County, she says, she "just didn't care." It wasn't that she had lost her zeal for the written word. Rather, she couldn't reconcile the bounding souls but threatened lives of her nephews with the idealistic love stories and King mimicry employed by her students. The two pursuits clashed in her mind. "I started searching for a way to connect writing to helping them," says Fischer, 40. "It was one of those things, when the idea came - I'm not sure why, I'm not sure how - I was 100 percent excited about it. "I'm loving what's happened." Fischer, a novelist and essayist who is among the authors participating in Writers at the Beach, had to hack through the peripherals that accompany incorporation. With the help of a small contingent of friends, she quickly learned about deadlines, publicity, sponsors and advertising. "It just wasn't ever a part of my world," says Fischer, who claims she'd never planned even a party. When selecting the writers, Fischer tried not to pick anyone more than a two- or three-hour drive away. She knew some of them. A few spread the word to colleagues. Fischer started with fiction writers, since she's one, and branched out to include writers of nonfiction and poetry. Fleda Brown, Delaware's poet laureate and a professor of English at the University of Delaware, will be among them. She marvels at the apparent flurry of activity in poetry downstate. "It seems to me that there's tremendous energy there," Brown says. She cites the Milton Poetry Festival, held each December in Milton, and the regular readings at Booksandcoffee, a bookstore in Dewey Beach. "This is just an example of how someone can take an idea and make it work on two levels, can combine what poets need and what writers need in the state with a serious charity need," Brown says. "It just seems to me that it's brilliant. And I really expect that years from now it'll be a festival that continues and grows." Fischer's goal is to draw 100 paying participants. So far, she says, enrollment is good. All proceeds from the $115-per-person fee will go to the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation. In each workshop, participants will explore a specific aspect of writing - generating poems, creating vivid characters, organizing a memoir, building character in the short story, or mining personal and factual stories for use in fiction. Each workshop will be limited to 12 participants. ('s poetry workshop is half-filled, and the others are about one-third filled.) Authors will lead three discussion groups from 2-3 p.m., and another three from 3-4 p.m. Topics of the first three panels include the inherent difficulties of writing about pain, grief and loss; the role of research and facts in fiction and the danger of using fictional techniques in nonfiction; and how to approach the unique subgenre of magazine journalism. The second set includes discussions about the sources of story ideas; the writer's responsibility to the story; and what it takes to live a writing life. Each discussion will be limited to 30 participants, although Fischer may consider adding a session if a topic generates enough interest. On the Web site (www.writersatthebeach.com), Fischer connects the conference to its beneficiary in a brief passage about her nephews. Her younger sister, Anne, has four children. All have mitochondrial disease. The two boys, however, are most severely affected. Fischer describes Sam following Zachary through the house on a spy mission, lugging behind him "all his infusion pumps and tubes that he shoves into a suitcase on wheels." Only her sister's words, Fischer says, can tell the story. Each week, Anne writes an entry in an online journal about her life with her children. She allowed Fischer to share three entries on the workshop's site; they were dated Dec. 31, 2003, and March 27 and June 14 of 2004. In the first entry, she mentions Sam's penchant for telling jokes that are funny only to him. His laughter is reason enough for family members to ask him to repeat his material. She marvels at the generosity of the strangers who donate the blood that becomes Sam's - "Who are these people that volunteer to give a part of themselves so that my child may live?" she writes - and acknowledges her boys' parallel fate as another child's Mito, as she calls it, eats away at his body. That night, Anne sat on the couch to read with Sam. He was cold, and she pulled a blanket over them. "A few minutes later," Anne writes, "someone else got under the blanket with us - Zachary. And there we were, just us three, reading and laughing and reading some more." Contact Yasiejko at 324-2778 or cyasiejko@.... IF YOU GO Writers at the Beach: Pure Sea Glass WHAT: Conference with all proceeds going to the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation WHEN: Saturday, March 5, 8:30 a.m.-7 p.m. WHERE: Crabber's Cove, Del. 1 at the bay, Ruddertowne, Dewey Beach COST: $115 INFORMATION: www.writersatthebeach.com, 841-2172, or Box 1326, Rehoboth Beach, DE 19971. THE LINEUP The conference lineup now includes: ¥ Sheri Reynolds, whose novel "The Rapture of Canaan" was an Oprah's Book Club selection and New York Times Bestseller ¥ O'Sullivan, a features editor at The Washingtonian magazine ¥ Debra Puglisi Sharp, author of "Shattered: Reclaiming a Life Torn Apart by Violence" ¥ Carolyn Parkhurst, whose novel "The Dogs of Babel" was a highlighted pick on NBC's "The Today Show" ¥ Brad Barkley, a novelist and short-story writer ¥ Liam Callanan, a novelist and a contributor to Slate, Forbes, and other magazines ¥ Novelist Pietrzyk ¥ Nonfiction naturalist Tom Horton ¥ Terry Plowman, editor and publisher of Delaware Beach Life magazine ¥ Poets Haley, and Fleda Brown. Copyright © The News Journal. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Gannett Co., Inc. by NewsBank, inc.