The Boston WNBA chapter began the year with a Yankee Book Swap on September 28. The event was held at Grub Street, the center for creative writing in Boston, and about thirty people attended. Each person told a little about her/himself and then presented a favorite book. It was an excellent way for people to get to know each other and everyone had a great time. A list of some of the books talked about is on the chapter's Facebook page.

NRGM

The annual  National Reading Group Month program was held October 18 at Hotel 140 in Boston's Back Bay, again with a good audience. Kate Whouley, author of Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words, moderated the evening, after telling about the genesis of her book. Panelists were Martha Southgate, whose most recent novel is The Taste of Salt, David Gillham, author of City of Women, and WNBA/Boston member Rosie Sultan talking about her book, Helen Keller in Love.

L to R: Daphne Kalotay; Rosie Sultan; Kate Whouley; Martha Southgate; David Gillham; Dawn Rennet

The WNBA-Boston booth at the Boston Book Festival on October 27 drew a lot of attention. It also offered an opportunity for member authors to sell their books. Hour and a half sessions were set up for each author, on a first come first serve basis. The Boston Book Festival, in its fourth year, is a wildly popular event and a great opportunity for the chapter to tell more people about WNBA.

The annual Holiday Tea will be held on December 2 with the theme "The Story behind The Best American Short Stories". Heidi Pitlor is the editor of this annual series, published by Houghton Mifflin. She will talk about how the series is put together each year and then contributors Edith Pearlman and Jennifer Haigh will read.  

Member News

Nicole M. Bouchard interviewed Dennis Lehane for The Write Place at the Write Time.  

Lisa Braxton, immediate past president, published an essay, "Wedding Planning," in the October issue of Literary Brushstrokes.

Karen Goodno-McGuire spoke about Louisa May Alcott and Charles Dickens at the Salem Athenaeum.  

Daphne Kalotay, chapter co-president, had an article "The Art of Reading Gina Berriault" that appeared in the Sept./Oct. issue of Poets & Writers magazine.    

Ann Kingman was interviewed on Inscribing Industry.

Anne Ipsen appeared on the panel "How to Write and Publish Fiction" at the Concord Festival of Authors.  

Margot Livesey won the New England Independent Booksellers Association's  2012 Fiction Award for her novel  The Flight of Gemma Hardy.  

Mary O'Hara's novel, Cascade, is a Library Journal pick and a People Magazine "People Pick."

Susan Kushner Resnick's literary memoir You Saved Me, Too  was published in October.

B. A. Shapiro's book, 

 The Art Forger, has just  

been released by Algonquin Books, and was the #1 IndieNext pick for November.

Maureen Stanton won the 2012 Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction for Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, published by Penguin Press.

NRGM

On October 10, eleven Detroit members attended a private dinner-with-the-authors before the National Reading Group Month event at a cozy seafood restaurant two blocks from the event venue in walkable Birmingham, Michigan. It was an excellent opportunity to get to know the authors Natalie Bakopoulos ( The Green Shore) and Dan Johnson (Detroit Breakdown) and relax with them before the event, and it was great fun to hear their stories. A short walk in the beautiful fall sun to the event followed. Beverages and trays of mini Greek pastries (in honor of Natalie) were served at the venue, with a signing following the event.  

L to R: Natalie Bakopoulos; Dan Johnson; Willetta Heisling

This was perhaps the most entertaining and well-paced event ever for NRGM Detroit, mostly due to the professional moderating skills of Willetta Heising. It felt intimate, relaxing, deep, and thoughtful--as well as often riotously funny!

Chapter News   

WNBA Detroit is gearing up for a spring to remember, with a big event in April featuring a panel of YA Authors, and the May Detroit Book & Author Society partnership bringing five authors to Detroit, including Debbie Macomber.  

Member News  

The Michigan Library Association  

Honors WNBA's Margaret Auer

Over 200 members of the Michigan Library Association attended the annual Awards Banquet at the statewide conference held in Detroit's riverfront Cobo Center November 7. Highest honors went to WNBA Detroit member, Treasurer, and past National Treasurer Margaret E. Auer, who won the President's Award for Service to MLA. "For over 40 years Margaret Auer has been actively engaged in MLA, serving as a perpetual volunteer and advocate for the organization," said Richard Cochran, MLA Past President.  

Margaret surrounded by friends and family at the Awards Banquet

She has many professional obligations as she is Dean of University Libraries for the University of Detroit Mercy, but always finds the time for an MLA project or assignment, generously giving of her time and insight.

Margaret Auer Photo: mla.library

Margaret has been an advocate for MLA, whether through her promotion of MLA membership or her encouragement of staff to participate or present at conferences and workshops. She promotes collaborations through the Michigan Academic Library community. She has also actively advanced MLA to a wide circle of vendors, even before MLA looked for strategic partners. Through her cultivation of these vendors, MLA has developed sustained financial support, which is vital to the association's well-being.

Margaret is a past-president of MLA and has served on the Annual Conference Committee numerous times, the Awards Task Force, MLA Leadership Academy Committee, and Michigan Author Award Committee. She has also received the MLA Lifetime Achievement Award, Librarian of the Year Award, and the Wayne State University Library Science Program's Distinguished Alumna Award.

Several WNBA Detroit members were proud to be a part of this celebration!

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NRGM

WNBA-Nashville members helped ensure the success of Nashville's 24th annual Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word, by moderating panels, chauffeuring authors, and helping at the chapter's booth during the three-day event, October 12-14.  

Jill Tardiff, Chris Tilghman & Lee Fairbend

Mayor Karl Dean

Special guest at Coffee with Authors was Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, an outspoken supporter of literacy causes. He gave a brief speech and then presented an official proclamation from the city of Nashville, honoring WNBA for organizing National Reading Group Month "...to promote reading groups and celebrate the joy of shared reading."

 
Chapter News
 

The WNBA-Nashville chapter participated in the mayor's Nashville Reads initiative by hosting a lively discussion of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale at the October meeting. Sponsored by Humanities Tennessee and Mayor Karl Dean's office, Nashville Reads events and programs were held in and around the city to honor Atwood, winner of the 2012 Nashville Public Library Literary Award.

The WNBA-Nashville chapter has chosen member Barbie Chadwick as their 2013 ATHENA Leadership Award nominee. Barbie, Alpha Omicron Pi's operations manager, exemplifies the qualities inherent in ATHENA Award winners: professional excellence, a history of community service, and a record of actively helping other women reach their leadership potential.

Member News

J.T. Ellison's new thriller, Edge of Black, was released  by Mira on November 13, 2012. The story is about Dr. Samantha Owens who moves to Georgetown University's forensic pathology department just as an unknown pathogen is released into the Washington Metro. More at www.jtellison.com.  

Veera Rajaratnam's work is included in the anthology Filtered Through Time, published by Westview in September, 2012. "This anthology of works by both emerging and seasoned writers gathers fresh, insightful poetry and fiction in recalling the defining and costly American Civil War."                                             

Gary Slaughter is the face of a PBS documentary: The Man who Saved the World. A communication officer aboard the destroyer USS Cony in 1962, Slaughter played a pivotal role in the encounter between the Cony and the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine, B-59. The documentary, shown throughout October in observance of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is part of Secrets of the Dead series.

Gary and Joanne Slaughter were featured in the September issue of Belle Meade Living. The article, part of the magazine's "Meet Your Neighbors" series, describes how the couple met, married, and joined forces to produce the award-winning series of Cottonwood novels. It delves into the couple's active volunteer life as well, including a plug for WNBA!

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NRGM 

The National Reading Group Month (NRGM) event for the Los Angeles chapter was...finally...a huge success. For the last two years the attendance has been low, but this year, there was good attendance, excellent audience enthusiasm, and outstanding authors. 

The event was held at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena; and the four authors were: Hector Tobar (The Barbarian Nurseries), Richard Kramer (These Things Happen), Attica Locke (The Cutting Season), and Naomi Benaron (Running the Rift). An eReader from SONY was donated for a raffle; and the winner was Sally Rich Arroyo, a longtime and very faithful patron of Vroman's.  

Ruth Light  Interim LA President

Except for Ruth Light, the LA chapter's interim president, introducing Hector Tobar as a Communist instead of a columnist (which everyone thought was very funny. . . especially Hector) the evening went smoothly. Rachelle Yousuf, vice president, did the organizing and publicity; and she did an excellent job of turning this event from worrisome to wonderful!

L to R: Naomi Benaron; Richard Kramer; Attica Locke; and Hector Tobar

The annual WNBA/RIO event was held on November 4. The RIO means Reads Its Own, and longtime chapter member and organizer extraordinaire, Lisa-Catherine Cohen, makes this happen every year. She gathers poets and authors and performance artists of many stripes, makes sure they are either members or that they sign up to be members before they read, and presents an afternoon of readings that are always funny, thought-provoking, and delightful. Lisa-Catherine has found a bookstore, Mystic Journey, that will probably be the permanent home for this event, and the readers donate excellent gift certificates for us to raffle off during the program.

This holiday season, the WNBA-LA chapter will be donating not only books to a homeless shelter, but also BOOK BUDDIES! Members are asked to bring a children's book to the holiday potluck, and to also bring a teddy bear to go with it. The bears are being called Book Buddies, and both books and bears will then be donated to a shelter that serves women and their children.

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San Francisco

On a stunningly beautiful fall day in San Francisco, WNBA-SF held their first mixer of the year, "Members Only CONNECT!" on Saturday, November 3, in Joan Gelfand's lovely home with an ocean view.    

Lucy Lang Day, Susan Cohen & Sandra Feder

It was the first of four Mixers this year to be held in locations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and it was lively and loud. A group of dynamic authors - with works ranging from preschool picture books to scholarly texts, from racy memoirs to cautionary love stories - mixed with librarians, editors, booksellers, and publishers. The successful event created the synergy that will continue to enliven and inform the WNBA-SF chapter.

Member News

Linda Joy Myers and Kate Farrell, coeditors for the upcoming anthology, Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the 60s and 70s, are still accepting submissions from women with telltale stories of that extraordinary era, through January 15, 2013. There will be contest prizes and publication opportunities (2,500 words max). Submission guidelines can be found at: www.timestheywereachanging.com.  

Mary Mackey's Sugar Zone won the 2012 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.The Award Ceremony was held on December 1 at the Rockridge Branch Library in Oakland CA. Nine of Mary Mackey's novels and her most recent collection of poetry, Sugar Zone, have just been published as Kindle e-books. Visit her website:  http://www.marymackey.com/.

Joan Gelfand signed a contract with Scarecrow Press to coedit, Women, Work and the Web: How the Web Creates Entrepreneurial Opportunities. Joan will coedit with Carol Smallwood. The book is due out in Fall, 2013. See submission details here: http://joangelfand.com/blog/ 

Diane Le Bow had two essays in the new anthology, Travel Stories from Around the Globe, published by Bay Area Travel Writers. WNBA-SF member Elisa Southard also had an essay in the collection.

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NRGM

On October 16, the WNBA-DC and the Arts Club of Washington cosponsored the National Reading Group Month event at the Arts Club's historic mansion. Authors Leslie Maitland and Vaddey Ratner read vignettes from their new books and demonstrated why reading groups clamor to explore their books. War, genocide, love, exile, identity, and transformation arced from World War II to today's headlines and illuminated the discussion moderated by Judy Leaver of WNBA-DC.

Martin Murray, Chairman of the Arts Center's Literature Committee, noted in his opening remarks that women were welcomed as full members of the elegant and creative Club from its beginning in 1916.

Leslie Maitland is the author of Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed (Other Press, 2012). Maitland, an investigative reporter, chose the memoir form to contextualize her Jewish mother's love affair with a Catholic Frenchman following her family's escape from Nazi Germany to occupied France in 1938. When Maitland read the scene, set in Marseille in 1942, of her mother's departure from Europe and her true love, audience members perched forward on their seats, stirred by Maitland's evocative imagery.

While the love story that defined her mother's life provided a continuous thread across decades and borders, Maitland emphasized the "hard and morally ambiguous choices" necessary to survive during war. She shared her own "greatest moral dilemma" as she searched for her mother's lost love while her father lay dying.

Vaddey Ratner, author of the novel In the Shadow of the Banyan (Simon and Schuster, 2012), was a five-year-old member of the royal family when the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. Her family survived by disguising themselves as peasants, going into exile, and leaving their privileged life behind. Ratner said, "I wrote the novel from the perspective of a child, but in the voice of an adult narrator who inhabits the child. My one purpose is to honor the lives lost." She read the narrator's experiences as a young girl separated from her parents and forced into hard labor for years. The extreme inhumanity led the girl to become mute, yet her interior dialogue remained eloquent.

One compelling theme for both authors is memory as a reason to live and a reason to bring shattering stories into the world. During the discussion period, Leaver asked what these books tell us about the struggle between good and evil, and the slaughter of innocents taking place in today's world. Maitland recounted her travels to detention camps full of refugees last year in countries where there is no freedom of the press or basic rights. "I was stunned to see that things don't change, that genocide continues," she said. "It is tragic."

Ratner responded that she wrote as a novelist because the voice of violence and atrocity can be so loud. She continued, "I have the capacity to create something that has just as much power. To live with hope, I have to always allow that the person who creates atrocities has the possibility of transformation."

Reading groups will talk for hours about the universal themes and intensely personal life stories of Vaddey Ratner and Leslie Maitland.

Member News 

Catherine Mayo is at work on a new travel memoir, World Waiting for a Dream: Travels in Far West Texas, Marfa, the Big Bend & Beyond, apropos of which she's hosting the "Marfa Mondays," a series of 24 podcasts exploring Marfa, Texas and environs through the end of 2013. Podcasts available here.

Richard Peabody has just released an anthology of his own short stories, Blue Suburban Skies, through Paycock Press. Learn more about his work here.

Lorine Kritzer Pergament has a short story--a finalist in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Contest in 2009--in the forthcoming issue of Gargoyle, a literary magazine edited by WNBA-DC member Richard Peabody.

Liliane Willens gave a talk on October 2 at the University of Maine at Presque Isle for its series of Distinguished Lecturers, 2012-2013, on "A First Hand Account of Life in China through World War II, Chinese Civil War and communist Takeover." 

My End-of-the-World Books

The world may or may not end on December 21; either way, Tabitha Whissemore explains why it's a good idea to have a go-to list, just in case.

Most book lovers have a Desert Island Top Five -- the books they'd lug along to a deserted island. They have books on their shelves they return to over and over again and would never even think of putting in a donation pile.

And then there are those other books, the ones that linger on the shelf with the spine uncracked. The books that cause a hint of guilt; the ones we can't quite part with but can't bring ourselves to read either. Those are my End-of-the-World books.

I turned to these books in June, when a storm of near-apocalyptic proportions knocked out power for four days. The dusty shelf contains leadership books I'd been given as gifts, some classics I lie about having read, a couple of sci-fi/fantasy novels, and a few large biographies that would better serve as doorstops. Some books had traveled with me from Minnesota to Maryland four years earlier.

Off the shelf I pulled Madam Secretary: A Memoir by Madeleine Albright. I hunkered down with it near a candle and an open window, feeling quite civilized and proud of myself for attempting to read an intelligent book. Each page I turned kicked up a cloud of dust. I made it through the first chapter before my mind wandered further and further from the words on the page. Every noise outside became amplified. I suddenly noticed the layers of dirt in the window sill and thought seriously about cleaning it. I made mental to-do lists.

This experiment had clearly failed.

Maybe, at the "end of the world," things are complicated enough without  adding a layer of newness. Comfort and familiarity were what I craved. I turned to my Desert Island Top Five. There was Little Women, with brittle and dog-eared pages and characters I knew and loved. I grabbed it off the shelf and took my place near the candle, with a warm glass of white wine and a smile on my face.

In preparing for Hurricane Sandy, I bypassed the End-of-the-World shelf altogether, without an ounce of guilt. Sitting next to my stock of candles, ready to break open in case of emergency, is To Kill a Mockingbird, a tried-and-true distraction from the storms raging outside my window.

The power stayed on, and my little apartment made it through the super storm unscathed. It turns out, though, I didn't need an excuse to crack open an old favorite. As for the End-of-the-World books, maybe someday I'll crack one open and discover a new favorite.  

Tabitha Whissemore is an editorial assistant at the American Association of Community Colleges where, among other things, she writes articles for the Community College Times and Community College Journal. She recently had a story published in the graphic novel District Comics: An Unconventional History of Washington, DC.