The Omnium Gatherum & Newsletter is published once a year by the Community of Writers. Filled with news of the publishing and other successes of our past-participants and staff, along with profiles, interviews and articles about writers and writing, and notices of Community of Writers’ events and activities, the Omnium Gatherum & Newsletter acts as a forum for past, current and future members of the Community of Writers.
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2009/2010 Omnium Gatherum & Newsletter- Issue 14
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Archives:
2008/2009 Omnium Gatherum & Newsletter- Issue 13
2007/2008 Omnium Gatherum & Newsletter - Issue 12
2006/2007 Omnium Gatherum & Newsletter - Issue 11
Past-Participant or Staff? Send Us Your News!
Let your friends and fellow writers, agents & editors know about your latest accomplishments by sending us your news for the upcoming Omnium Gatherum & Newsletter.
Format for News:
We include
• publishing credits
• awards
• similar writing-related achievements
• births (you can include a photo, which we might run)
News should be from the past year only.
We don’t include
• readings, unless it’s a really big deal
• biographical material that is not current news
Please compose it in third person and use complete sentences, following the format of the examples below. Include titles, periodicals, publisher, and publication dates, as relevant.
Deadline to submit news: September 15, 2010.
Send News to: Maxima Kahn
Put NEWSLETTER in the subject line.
Next Issue: Our next issue will be published in February, 2011.
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News Examples:
POETRY WORKSHOPS
Tara Bray (97): Her first collection of
poems, Mistaken For Song, was published
by Persea Books in 2009 and won the 2008
Lexi Rudnitsky Prize.WRITERS WORKSHOPS
Melody Chan Graves (06): Her short
story “The Final Bow” won the Southern
California Review Annual Prize in Fiction
and appears in the Spring 2009 issue.SCREENWRITING WORKSHOPS
Lisa Swenson (Screen 09,05; WW 04):
She received a Film House Residency from
the San Francisco Film Society to complete
preproduction on her film Saltwater, and is
simultaneously developing a documentary,
An Unexamined Life. Squaw participant
Cynthia Philips has joined the production
team.
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Our next issue deadline is in December, 2009. Make sure you reserve your ad now. We only accept advertising from writers or publishers who have a direct connection with the Community of Writers.
Send questions to: Maxima Kahn
NEWSLETTER in the subject line.
Participant Profile: Tara Betts
Tara Betts attended the Poetry Workshops in 2009. She received her MFA in 2007 from New England College. Her first collection, Arc and Hue, was published by the Willow Books imprint of Aquarius Press in September.
Of this collection she wrote in her blog: “There were many days when I thought the first book might not ever happen. Now, that it’s here, I find myself wanting to write the next one, but better, stronger, with less apprehension. I’m just realizing that 
the people that I held back for are no longer alive. I never wanted to hurt their feelings, embarrass them, or air family secrets. I’ve kept the door closed on so many things that kept me angry, embarrassed, and even depressed. Now, I’m feeling that I might be a little bit free…to unpack the ugly I’m unwilling to carry, the kinds that many of us try to tamp down into our bones and pretend they don’t happen. There is a time to bear witness and put burdens down.”
Tara began writing poetry shortly after reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Now, she says, “I find myself truly in awe of writers like Kwame Dawes, Joyce Carol Oates, bell hooks and Marilyn Nelson. All of them are writers who are stretching beyond poetry and creating a body of much-needed literature. I’d like to aspire toward that.”
Tara is a lecturer in creative writing at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ and a Cave Canem fellow. She co-founded GirlSpeak, a weekly writing/leadership workshop for young women. She has also conducted workshops in schools, community centers, Ms. Foundation, City Girls (a substance abuse rehabilitation center for teen girls), Cook County Jail, Cooper Union, Dodge Foundation’s Poets-In-The-Schools program and elsewhere.
She writes: “In 1999, I proposed and co-taught the first performance poetry classes at Gallery 37. I also spent many Saturdays at Young Chicago Authors where we started the day writing, and it was the most exhilarating part of my day.”
Tara’s work has appeared in Essence, the Steppenwolf Theater production Words on Fire, Obsidian III, Callaloo, PMS, Meridians, WSQ, Columbia Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Hanging Loose, Drunken Boat and many other journals. Her work has been featured in twelve anthologies, including Gathering Ground, Bum Rush the Page, Power Lines, Black Writing from Chicago, These Hands I Know, Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism and Letters to the World. Tara has also been a freelance writer for publications such as XXL, The Source, BIBR, Mosaic Magazine and Black Radio Exclusive.
She has appeared on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam” and was one of the writers/performers in girlstory, an intergenerational, multicultural women’s performance collective. After winning Guild Complex’s Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award, she represented Chicago twice at the National Poetry Slam. She has performed her work in Cuba, London, New York, the West Coast and throughout the Midwest from the Studio Museum of Harlem to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and from Harvard University to Ladyfest Midwest.
www.tarabetts.net
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2009/2010 Omnium Gatherum & Newsletter- Issue 14
Participant Profile: Holly Payne
Holly Payne attended the Screenwriting workshops in 2007. No stranger to writing for screen or otherwise, she has spent seven years teaching screenwriting and story development at the Academy of Art University and five years with the faculty of the MFA Writing Program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
She is the author of Kingdom of Simplicity, The Sound of Blue, and The Virgin’s Knot. Published in nine countries, The Virgin’s Knot received critical acclaim as a Contra Costa Times Book Club Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection 2002, a Border’s Original Voices Book 2002 and was nominated for The First Novelist Award by the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. Payne’s second novel, The Sound of Blue, is set during the Balkan conflict and is based on a true story of a Serbian refugee whom she befriended while teaching English in Hungary.
After being struck by a drunk driver in 1994 and left unable to walk for nearly a year, Holly Payne received a letter from the driver asking for forgiveness. Instead of a letter, she wrote a novel, Kingdom of Simplicity. Kingdom of Simplicity is set in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where Holly grew up close to the Amish community. The book, which won a Marin Arts Council Grant for Fiction, centers around an Amish youth, Eli, who is unable to forgive the person who killed his family. The Amish have a strong tradition and practice of forgiveness, so Eli’s inability to forgive makes him an outsider. While Holly was writing the novel, the brutal shooting death of five Amish girls shocked the community and the world. “Two years prior, I had written a scene in which five Amish sisters are killed in a hit-and-run buggy accident, which is the crux of the whole story. The reaction that I imagined the Amish community to take was now playing out in real-time in 2006. The Amish immediately forgave the shooter, reached out to his family, and attended his funeral the next Friday while they were burying their own daughters.”
The real event was a challenge for Holly: “At first, I thought I should stop writing the book because no one would want to read a ‘fictional’ account of something that had just happened. For at least a month, I sat at my desk and cried for those girls and their families and all the first-response people involved in the aftermath. It took a full hour each day to face the pages and continue to the end. But through the writing, I completed something in my own life and was able to see how much I needed to reach out to the drunk driver who hit me and hope that he knew I had forgiven him and would find a way to forgive himself.”
Holly received a BA in journalism from the University of Richmond and a MFA from the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC where she produced her first film. She has lived and worked in London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hungary, Turkey, Croatia and continues to travel in search of stories that illuminate the endangered people and places of the world. She is currently at work on a new novel of historical fiction set in Bulgaria. In 2009, the University of Richmond honored her with a Distinguished Alumni Award.
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2009/2010 Omnium Gatherum & Newsletter- Issue 14