Fran Halpern hosts the lively, often funny Beyond Words, a radio show for literary toilers, word lovers and political junkies which airs Saturday at Noon on KCLU, an NPR affiliate: 88.3 in Ventura County & 102.3 in Santa Barbara County, on the web: KCLU.org.

Calls are welcome during the show 805/493-9200.

Linda Stewart-Oaten & Susan Chiavelli Co-winners of Santa Barbara Independent's Summer Writing Contest

Tired of the same old fireworks on the Fourth of July? Then pick up a copy of the Independent and read Linda and Susan's winning entries, plus some up and coming new talent. (available on Santa Barbara news stands, July 3)

Linda's personal memoir, "The Right Shoes" began with a writing assignment on "Shoes" from our CoV editor, Grace Rachow.  This goes to show what original and fresh writing can come from an exercise.

Susan's short story, "Winter Oranges" is an early story in her novel in linked stories currently in progress. Those of you who have read, "How to Sneak Out," in When We Were Young (vol. ll) have met this protagonist as a teenager.

We are proud to note that other CoV writers have won the Inde contest in past years. Of special interest is Janis Culmback, a two-time winner! Below is the beginning of an archival list. We don't want to leave anyone out, so if you are a CoV writer and past Inde winner, please contact us and we'll look forward to adding your name to our growing list!

2002: Linda Stewart-Oaten for her personal memoir "The Right Shoes"
2002: Susan Chiavelli for her short story "Winter Oranges"
2000: Janis Culmback for her personal memoir "Tibetan Book of the Dead"
1998: Karen Kasaba for her short story "Sparks"
1998: Sue Schwartz for her pesonal memoir "Second Grade Was Good."
1997: Janis Culmback for her personal memoir "Visiting Mother"

Fran Davis Nominated for Pushcart Prize

Fran Davis's prize-winning essay "The Nightingale Blues" has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Her essay won The Chattahoochee Review's  2001 Lamar York prize for nonfiction (and $1000).  It was published in the Summer 2001 edition of The Chattahoochee Review.

Fran's short story "An Act of God" appeared in the 2001 edition of Reed Magazine, and another short story "Especially Babe" will be published by Passager later this year. Fran says she began to feel "slightly overwhelmed" when a New York agent contacted her to ask if she had a novel. She didn't, but she's working on it.

CollectedStories.com features
Santa Barbara Writers

Encore! for "The Bobby, Mom & Mel Show"

Linda Stewart-Oaten's short story, "The Bobby, Mom & Mel Show" is now showcased at CollectedStories.com. "The Bobby, Mom & Mel Show" was a finalist in GlimmerTrain's Fall 1996 Short Story Award for New Writers, a finalist in the 1997 Chesterfield Writers' Film Project. It appeared in World Wide Writers in 1999 and has just been made available in Braille by the Royal National Institute of the Blind.

Susan Chiavelli's prize-winning story, "Whale" (published a third time) was a featured selection on CollectedStories.com, Spring 2002. It won the 1998 Santa Barbara Writers' Conference first-place fiction award, a 2000 William Saroyan Conference first-place Persie award, and placed as a finalist in the New Millennium Writings Awards contest XII (12/01).

Susan says, "It's wonderful to have a story receive so much attention, but sometimes it feels as if I've stumbled into the movie Ground Hog Day.  'Whale' was written during a flight high above the ocean in 1997, long before tragic events at Columbine High School gave rise to this new genre of 'a boy and his gun' stories."

Karen Kasaba's prize-winning story, "Sparks," appeared as a CollectedStories feature in May/June 2001 and can be found in their archives. It has most recently been published in The Chariton Review. To read more about Karen's writing philosophy see the article by Tom Jacobs in the Santa Barbara News-press Scene (3/22/02).

Visit collectedstories.com to read their short stories as well as to see the cover art created for each story, author bios, and lots of news and links to contests.

Jean Harfenist's linked story collection,' A Brief History of the Flood' is now on the bookshelves. (Knopf June, 2002.) The first stop on her tour was the New Book Panel of the Santa Barbara Writers' Conferernce.

"Reading Jean Harfenist's stories is like finding a hot slot machine in a casino. One winner after another? In wild defiance of the odds? Who cares. Stay seated."
--Richard Russo

Jean's responses in the Q&A are encouraging to writers all levels of writers.

Three more stories from 'A Brief History of the Flood': “Pixie Dust” is in the new issue of the online magazine, The Barcelona Review; “Duck Season” is in the current issue of Quarterly West; and “Safety Off, Not a Shot Fired” will appear in the spring issue of The Sycamore Review.

Home Is Where The Bus Is by Anne B. Johnson will be out soon. Publishers Weekly gave it a small blurb in their August 13 edition. Under the heading HIT THE ROAD JACK, they wrote, "The Johnsons didn't just spin their wheels. In 1960, they gassed up a decrepit Santa Barbara city bus, hustled their 8 kids aboard and headed out, hitting 14 countries in 20 months."

At the Cold War's height, Vernon Johnson decided to do his bit to abet world peace. His widow, Anne Beckwith Johnson, recalls those wayfaring days in Home Is Where The Bus Is (John Daniel & Co., November 2001) "The plot line is the trip," says publisher John Daniel, "but it's also a story about family life, like Cheaper By The Dozen. Along the way, they met Anita Ekberg filming La Dolce Vita in Rome. They met Khrushchev. It's a true story about international relations."

Other books from Daniel & Daniel Publishers:
That Air Forever Dark, by Bradford Dillman, a wild novel about a bunch of American tourists marooned on a savage island in New Guinae.

Subversives, by Frank Frost, a collection of hilarious stories reminiscent of Roald Dahl or the Twilight Zone.

All for Animals, by Karen Lee Stevens, a guide to living a more compassionate life in the company of animals.

Journey of Love, by Sharon Eve, a guide for the grieving.

John DanielÞs new collection of stories, Generous Helpings has now been published by Shoreline Press, and it can be previewed at http://www.danielpublishing.com/books/suppl/daniel04.html

Fair Game? The Use of Standardized Tests in College, Graduate School, and Professional School Admissions Decisions by Rebecca Zwick will be published by Routledge Falmer in Spring 2002.

Underbelly, a poetry chapbook by Kathy O'Fallon, (FarStarFire Press), is available on www.Amazon.com.

Jim Lawrence says: A photo book I wrote for a conservation organization Celebration of the Land: The Last Sanctuaries. (Agrupacion Sierra Madre, September 2001) won the 2001 PMA Benjamin Franklin Award. It's a coffee table-sized book (and heavy!) with 13 essays that accompany the photographic work of 13 nature photographers from all over the world, including Art Wolfe, Jim Brandenburg, Frans Lanting, Jean-Paul Ferrero and Fritz Polking. Another book I wrote, Plateau Light, with David Muench, won the same award in 1999.

I just completed Wild L.A., a similar style book about the surprising breadth and depth of nature areas within a 90-mile radius of downtown L.A., for Sierra Club Books.

A series of six humor books by Sally Franz, titled: The Baby Boomers Mini-Field Guides to: Aging, Menopause, Co-Dependency, Mid-life Crisis, Your Aging Parents, and Raising Teens.

Also out this spring was I Love Him When... by Sally Franz, and out this fall will be an essay collection A Book Of Life's Firsts with contributing author Sally Franz. All of these books of FranzÞs are published by Nightengale Press an imprint of Wimbleton Press, London.

Marni McGee reports: Sleepy Me came out in May 2001from Simon & Schuster. It got good reviews and was an ABA "Pick of the List" -- which, needless to say, was thrilling. The illustrations are fabulous. I just love `em. This makes the next bit of news equally exciting.

The companion book to Sleepy Me, with the same whimsical illustrator, Sam Williams, is coming out next spring. It's Wake Up, Me. Also in Spring 2002, The Colt and the King will be published by Holiday House. This one is the Palm Sunday story, written from the point of view of the donkey that carried Jesus. And then the year after that, in 2003, Butterfly, Butterfly will be published by Boxer Books, illustrated by Manya Stojik.

Carol B. DeCanio, 1999 Bill Downey Award recipient, received an Award for Excellence in Writing at the June 2001 Santa Barbara Writers Conference.

In April, Rebecca Zwick was the recipient of the 2001 National Council on Measurement in Education Award for Outstanding Dissemination of Educational Measurement Concepts to the Public, for "insightful and balanced scholarship in publications on standards and high stakes testing and use of the SAT in college admissions."

Kathy O'Fallon was the runner-up for the best unpublished poetry manuscript at the San Diego Book Awards in 2000.

Liz Newman: I completed my MFA in Creative Writing!

Tim Pompey just received notification that he won first place in the Still Waters Press Winter Poetry Award 2000 and will have his chapbook, "Getting Through The Fog", published late 2001. The announcement can be found online at: http://members.plexi.com/~nekton/Poeteria.html

The Santa Ynez Writing Group resumes with Leonard Tourney as leader.
Information: Diane de Avalle-Arce, diandaa@mindspring.com

Ian Bernard's Writing Group (with a focus on humor)
Information: Ian Bernard, ian@syv.com

A long-standing Fiction Writer's Group with Yvonne Nelson Perry, Suzanne deCayette, Kathy O'Fallon, and other SBWC regulars is looking for new members. The group meets around San Diego twice a month, Saturday mornings at 10.
Information: Kathy O'Fallon, kathyofallon@earthlink.net

John Daniel offers free-lance literary services. Check out http://www.danielpublishing.com/litserv.htm

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HOW I GET INTO a WRITING FRAME of MIND
by Katie Ingram

I enter a special world of writing inhabited by characters and imagination. It is a long way from "here" to "there," especially when I have had a distracting week with company, plans, agendas, have-to's, want-to's, laughter, food, camaraderie, memory mining.

Like Alice's world, the world of writing fades back. I have to step through the mirror again, leap into the dark pool, close my eyes and fall straight into the hole that takes me underground. It is subtle. Almost impossible. I must choose another mental world so that I can create.

CREATE, or RELATE, or REPORT, or RECORD. Sometimes I do not know which it is. I only know that I can do it alone. I can write in a coffee shop with strangers. I can write in a park. But I cannot write in a golf shop, at the mall, while a friend watches TV in the same room, or while someone is waiting for me to go somewhere.

It is a matter of acknowledging that being an alchemist is special and requires a certain seclusion and pampering of the spirit. That is what makes me crazy--swinging on a bungee cord from one world to the other.

RECCOMMENDED BOOKS
by Betsy Mooney

Poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge (author is friend of Perie Longo)

The Poet's Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux

The Top 500 Poems edited by William Harmon

100 Ways to Improve Your Writing by Gary Provost (small paperback you can carry around to remind yourself).