I belong to the San Francisco Writers Workshop, a writers group that has been in existence since the 1940s with circulating membership. Currently, our leader is Tamim Ansary, author of West of Kabul, East of New York.
I love our group. Since writing is such a solitary activity, it’s great to get together with a bunch of people on a weekly basis and share our heartaches/successes/slog tales. It’s also good to get some feedback on a work in progress from serious writers.
Our group has spawned some well-known writers, like Tamim; Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner; Joe Quirk, author of The Ultimate Rush and a forthcoming book on evolutionary biology vis a vis the genders; Michael Chorost, author of Rebuilt; and Maria Strom, author of Rainbow Joe and Me.
There’s also been a spate of debut novelists getting publishing contracts. Kemble Scott’s book SoMa will be published by Kensington (I just read it and it’s a page-turner); Melodie Bowsher’s book The Embezzler’s Child will come out from Bloomsbury; and my novel tentatively titled A Woman of Ill Fame will be published by Heyday.
Our group has many, many talented writers, including Gary Turchin, and I know their turn is coming up next if there’s any justice in the world.
A note on the post titled “Please Excuse Prior Post”—that post was apologizing for a test post that appeared with the enigmatic text of simply “bbb.” While I had deleted the post, it simply wasn’t disappearing, so I decided to let it lay and address it… when of course, it then decided to disappear. Ah well. C’est la vie. Or as my high school French teacher used to say so astutely, “C’est la vie, c’est la guerre; ce n’est pas une pomme de terre” (That’s life, that’s war; it’s not a potato.)
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