Turbulent times. I am now joined by sarah owen from the Writers Forum. Welcome to our meeting, and thank you so much for thinking of us and coming to join us today. Were honored to have you here. First, start off with, what this Writers Forum . The Writers Forum is an organization that had its early begins in the early nights a when we early 80s who were people who were writing and wanted to meet with likeminded folks. We eventually became a Larger Organization and more formal, and when we decided we needed a mission statement, what we decided was that our mission is to promote the craft of writing as an art and profession and we felt that covered all the needs our community would have and we have a far reaching community. We good beyond Redding Redding d beyond shasta come. We have people from as far away as maybe even southern oregon, sacramento, and to the east and to the west, up in the foothills and some of the mountain communities. How did you get involved and what is your role. Going back to so many years ago if cant believe im old enough to tell you the whole story. But ive always for years and year eyes been interested in writing. I wasnt sure what sort of writing, so i took some news writing and reporting courses at our local college, and went on take photo to journalism classes and then when we ran out of course friday n writing here in out of courses in writing here in the area i started looking for groups and saw an ad for a critique group. Joined that group, run bay lovely woman here in town for a few years while her husband wag finishing a medical internship at one of hour hospitals. Win we realized we had several groups doing this independent of each other, we brought those groups together into one organization, and that was how it began in the early 80s and grew and developed from there, and it has thrived and remained a vibrant organization, including the 501 c 3 that we were granted in the early 90s, and my role has most of the time when i ive been on theboard ive been the Program Director in early years so far back i barely remember until i see my plaque on me wall in my office i was actually the president at one time, but i really enjoy the Program Director position, and have been doing that now again for several years. I was out of this state in the early 90s, going back to finish getting my degrees at a university in connecticut, but once i came back home and got back involved, i got back into the Program Director role again. What are your for follow up on that, what are your responsibilities. Primarily to ensure that we have a presenter for each of our eight program. S that we put on for our group. We have monthly meetings, and eight times a year we try to present a program that is both educational and somewhat entertaining, and we try to keep a broad variety of topics so that no matter what our members interests are, they have an opportunity to Gain Knowledge and skills in whatever fields their writing interests lie. How do you decide on what you guys read about our talk about during the times you meet . Guest we. We have a board of ten members and as Program Director i have always asked my board to give me suggestions or ideas and we discuss those at our Board Meeting and we look become the schedule in see when was the last time our talk was on poetry, when did we last discuss fiction, short story, how to write the essay. Even things like maybe near tax time we bring in a tax expert or someone who can talk about other legal aspects of writing, what is libel, how do you avoid copyright infringement, that sort of thing. So we just try to paint with the broadest possible brush so that we dont miss any topics that might be of value to our members. And the board is very helpful to me with that. Recently we sent out a survey to all of our members, and we put in the survey every possible topic, category we could think of and we asked them to evaluate the number number this in order of your interests, one to ten, what you would hoke like to see and the results is the Program Schedule we have year, and coming up next month we have the craft of we have elements of a fiction and after that the craft of writing a memoir, and then following up with that we have were going to have a presentation on writing biography. So, we just keep it as broad as possible that we touch on any potential writing interests. What has been the response from the community . We have a great response. We get good Media Coverage for every one of our meetings. When we have Something Special going on we get even special Media Coverage that way. We try, when we can to include the community in our activities. One reason we have done the authors fair is that pulls in a lot of people who are not members and who dont attend our general meetings, but that gives them an opportunity to come and put their books out and meet with people and have an opportunity to let people know what theyre doing out there. Weve years ago we did something that i really enjoyed because im also you may remember from a previous conversation about acting and theater. We have a very vibrant, active theater in the community that extorted out about the same time we did and theres been some back and forth, and in fact our speaker today is very involved with that. Research, how many time havent you read something or watched something on television or in a movie we did a talk several months ago about writing for the live stage, and so that will bring in potential Community Members who may not be regular members but that is something they want to know about. So what we trito do is do enough publicity about our program so that anyone in the community, who may not be a regular member, can have an opportunity to come and hear something useful to them, too. What is this mean to redding to have a Writers Forum like this that you help direct . What does it mean to redding to have a Writers Forum. I think it mean as lot to redding. We have done scholarship funds for High School Students for several years. We have been funding 250 and 500 scholarships, depending on how our treasury is looking and we have done that every year so we have inspired a lot of young people through every school in our entire redding community. We have given them the opportunity to write and to submit work and to be eligible for scholarships, and we have also we try our best to let any writer know, any writer who can make it to our meetings to know were out here because of the opportunities for networking, and what we have done, too, is one of the things im really proud of is that we have a lot of writers who want to be published, so when were able to work out the details that we need to in terms of location and time and money, we have been able to bring top level literary agents to come for an entire day and do a special workshop just so that the people who want to know more about the business and how the business actually works and how they may get published can hear from the experts and we try too do that, too as often as were able because there are many people many talent peopled who just need to know more about the business and about how to go about it. They can get that writing head start, you know, and not have to wait until retirement before they take it on. Before i end, i i just want to say thank you for inviting us here and your meeting and thank you. And thank you. Were thrilled of you. Were standing on the sundown bridge, one of reddings main attractions, drawing thousands of visitors every year. Continuing our coverage on reddings literary culture, we speak with author steve callen about his time as a game warden in the state of california. I group up as the son of a game warden, and so the first my teenage years i spent a lot of the time riding on patrol with my dad. So i had all these Great Adventures working with him as well, so thats where the name of the book came. And then later on i became a fish and game warden myself, and then i continued wring
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