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Monday, May 28, 2007

A Quilt and Craft Writing Project

Jane Kirkpatrick, author of thirteen award-winning and bestselling historical novels and three non-fiction books has just signed with WaterBrook Press/Random House for a new project combining history, quilts and crafts. Her agency, Hartline Marketing and Literary Services announced the agreement today.
Stitching Stories: The Quilts and Crafts of the Aurora, Oregon Colony will be published in the fall of 2008. Both a gift book of inspiration and a tribute to the longest-surviving communal Christian colony in the western United States, Stitching Stories is set to coincide with renewed interest in the American craft movement as well as the 150th anniversary of Oregon's statehood in 2009. Kirkpatrick's Change and Cherish Historical Series is based on the life of the only woman sent west to help found the western colony in the 1850s. Book three in the fictional series, A Mending at the Edge will be released by WaterBrook/Random House in April, 2008. A Tendering in the Storm, book two, has received critical acclaim since its release in April. (www.faithfulreader.com).
Settled in 1856 as a German-American Christian community whose members traveled from Pennsylvania and Missouri to Aurora, Oregon, its artisans were known for their weaving of beauty, faith and function through their colorful quilts and fibers, unique basketry, fine music, hand-tooled furniture and the culinary arts that served their neighbors and each other. The colony disbanded in 1884 but the town it founded continues on the historic register as one of the oldest settlements in Oregon and its history is one of a faith community living with relevance to the outside world. A fine museum houses the artifacts including more than 80 original quilts many of which will be highlighted with photographs in this coffee table gift book. Read more about this and other works at www.jkbooks.com and www.janekirkpatrick.blogspot.com

Member Contract News

WWW friends, I have spent five years of my life making this following announcement happen.

I have been offered a contract for my biography of Nancy Harkness Love, the woman who founded and led the women pilots who ferried airplanes for the U.S. Army in World War II. I began researching and writing this book in the spring of 2002.

On April 30, I completed the lengthy peer review process with the University of North Texas Press in Denton, Texas. — The waiting and responding, always positively, to the critiques, and working to EVER improve on the manuscript, were grueling. Today — May 22, 2007 — the university’s editorial board endorsed my work and approved a contract.

We don’t have the title nailed down yet, but it will be something like Nancy Harkness Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II. The target publication is in time for the Women In Aviation Conference, to be held mid March 2008 in San Diego. The women and men who attend this conference are my “choir” so to speak — they buy my books about the women who flew in WWII.

This will be the first biography on Love, who died in 1976. It follows my history of Nancy’s group — THE ORIGINALS: The Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron of World War II, published in 2001 by Disc-Us Books Inc. Love recruited 28 women in the fall of 1942 to form the initial women’s ferrying squadron for the Air Transport Command, U.S. Army Air Forces.

Nancy’s “girls”— the group grew from the original 28 to a high of 303 in early 1944 — began ferrying trainers then moved up to twin-engine aircraft and a few, including Love, flew the big four-engine bombers like the B-17. But the biggest job these women did for the Army was to ferry the swift, capricious WWII fighters known as pursuits — the fastest planes the Army had in 1944. The women moved these airplanes from the factories to the docks on both coasts to be shipped abroad to combat.
The women who flew — as civilians — for the Army in World War II became known as the WASP in 1943.

Nancy Love was a true a pioneer — a woman with courage, spirit and vision. More to come on the Nancy Love book as we proceed toward publication.

Posted by Sarah Byrn Rickman
Also the author of THE ORIGINALS: The Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron of World War II — a history —
and FLIGHT FROM FEAR — a WASP WWII novel.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Advice for a young writer (or any writer!)

I'm writing an article for a magazine aimed at young artists of all sorts - writers, dancers, actors, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers. My assignment is to interview noted arts professionals and ask them what they'd say to emerging artists to help them make their work shine, shout out, be noticed.

When I interviewed poet David Lee - Lee was one of the top two candidates for the post of Poet Laureate of the United States the other year and has been called the Mark Twain of humorous poetry - he offered these four nuggets:

1. Believe in yourself. This above all else, to thine own self be true, Polonius from Shakespeare's Hamlet.
2. Have a commitment to what you do. You were probably chosen to be an artist: the words choose the writer.
3. Have an audience in mind. I pick people and write my poems to them. When I think they would like it, it's probably well-written.
4. Be well-read: fifty percent of good writing is good reading.
May the words flow!
Susan J. Tweit
Check out my weekly podcasts on my web site or read more on my blog