Joe Plumeri Fellowship

In Memory of His Son Christian Plumeri

April 2017

The Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, a writers’ retreat center in Northern California, is now seeking applications for our next Joe Plumeri Fellowship in April 2017 in memory of Joe’s son Christian Plumeri, awarded to writers pursuing a book project exploring any aspect of the power of healthy living and a positive perspective to make a difference, a work of fiction or creative nonfiction exploring an inner journey, not just a quest to eat more quinoa, perfect your plank pose or run the Boston Marathon. The work of fellows will help spread awareness in this critical area. The fellowships carries a stipend of $5,000 and the deadline to apply is March 1.

Joe Plumeri, a New York-based philanthropist and former CEO of several Fortune 500 companies, shares in his national bestseller The Power of Being Yourself the wrenching story of how his son Chris suffered from anorexia starting at age thirteen. But at the time, in the early 1980s, anorexia and other eating disorders were poorly understood and little talked about, especially where boys were involved. Chris went from issues with eating to issues with alcohol and drugs. Joe, looking back, feels he wasn’t there enough for him, making Chris’ sudden death in November 2008 all the more painful. In his book and public appearances, Joe urges others to learn from his mistakes as a father. In sponsoring this writing fellowship, through the Joe Plumeri Foundation, he hopes to encourage writers with the passion to bring greater understanding to the nexus of food and health, not through overtly academic or journalistic work but through projects that bring at least a component of personal writing.

Fellows spend a month in our Zen Suite (pictured), with a balcony looking down on the forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains and, in the distance, Monterey Bay, and a rear exit toward our grove of redwoods.  A visiting writing fellow can savor many hours of solitude,  in the Zen Suite or elsewhere on our four acres of beautiful land, four miles up from the Pacific Ocean near Santa Cruz, California, and can also enjoy joining the permanent residents of WCR for our delicious common evening meals, prepared with fresh fruit and vegetables from our own organic gardens and often eggs from our hens. Twice a week we have morning yoga.

• Each Tuesday, fellows can participate in our weekly OpenMic Night, a chance to read an excerpt from the writing they’re doing to a small group, which can offer immediate encouragement and feedback.
• The fellow receives one hourlong one-on-one consultations per week with author and Wellstone Books publisher Steve Kettmann, co-director of WCR, whose book credits as author and co-author include four New York Times best-sellers.
• One weekend during the month we will hold one of our regular Author Talk events, featuring two prominent writers working in the general area of the intersection of food and health.

Please pay close attention to the criteria, if you’d like to be one of the few selected as a finalist:

• Preference will be given to writers with both previously published books and a current book project under contract that fulfills our broad requirement of being at the intersection of food and health.
• Books must have some element of personal writing or story-telling; that is, they must fall under the broad rubric of creative nonfiction or fiction. Novelists are very much welcome to apply.
• Book projects that are predominantly academic or journalistic are not eligible. (Other institutions provide support for those types of projects.)

To apply for the April 2017 Plumeri Fellowship, please email a letter of 800 to 1,000 words to sarah@wellstoneredwoods.org offering an overview of the project you’d like to pursue during your time with us, explaining why you think you and your project would make an ideal fit and why you believe you would be an asset to our community; as well as one sample of your writing, between 1,000 and 2,000 words long; and a resume listing your work experience and publications. Please let us know how you heard about us and the fellowship. Deadline is March 1, 2017. We will choose three finalists, reach out to them via phone or email with any follow-up questions we might have, and then announce the winner. We ask people to apply only if they are available for the entire length of the fellowship, from April 10 to May 8. 

ABOUT THE WELLSTONE CENTER

Founded in 2012 by Sarah Ringler and Steve Kettmann, the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods was named to San Francisco Magazine‘s 2013 “Best of the Bay” issue for its weekend workshops, and has been extolled in the San Jose Mercury News as “kind of like heaven” and in the San Francisco Chronicle as a “the kind of place where inspiration seems to just hang in the air, waiting to be inhaled.” Our books, published through our Wellstone Books imprint, have attracted attention at the New Yorker and in The New York Times. The Wellstone Center helps create the writers of tomorrow and helps free the writer living inside all of us. We do this by bringing people together in a tranquil and peaceful environment to provide them with new ideas and inspiration and also by publishing a select number of books through our Wellstone Books imprint.