For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.
T.S. Eliot
It was a crazy year, for us here at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods and for the country and the world, a year in which the news was more often dominated by the scary than the hopeful, a year in which the mean and the crude were often ascendant. Sarah and I have modest hopes for the impact we can have with the quiet, inspiring environment we foster at the Wellstone Center, but we’re reminded of the need to do what we can to try, and we’re excited to be moving forward in 2016 as a small writers’ retreat center and publisher looking to help people lean into what’s best in themselves.
One snapshot from 2015 says a lot about what we’re hoping to create: Dusty Baker published a book with us called Kiss the Sky: My Weekend in Monterey at the Greatest Concert Ever, the first volume in our “Music That Changed My Life” series, all of which will feature covers by incomparable San Francisco artist Mark Ulriksen. Dusty was here at the Wellstone Center, staying in the Zen Suite, the night of his first event for the book, a rollicking evening at Bookshop Santa Cruz, when he heard via his wife that the Washington Nationals, down to a choice between Bud Black and Dusty to replace Matt Williams as manager, had gone with Black. As Dusty told John Shea in the San Francisco Chronicle, “I was really disappointed, but I was in a place for a couple of days where you can handle disappointment. It gave me strength.” She went on to explain: “That was in the Santa Cruz area, at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, an in-the-hills writers’ retreat co-founded by former Chronicle sportswriter Steve Kettmann.” We liked helping Dusty through a difficult experience, and we love his book, which earned a nice write-up at the New Yorker. The best part of the story, though, is the kicker: In the end Dusty did land the Nationals’ job.
When it comes to writing and the writing life, if we can help people “handle disappointment,” we’ve done a lot – since every writer must learn to tango with disappointment day in and day out. We’ll continue with our twice weekly yoga classes this coming year, usually led by Sarah, and look for ways to keep creativity fun and interesting, even as we also emphasize the difficult, painstaking side of writing and creative achievement. It’s easy to bake bread, for example, as it’s easy to write a paragraph, but only a mix of talent, knowledge, care and inspiration can leave you with something truly special and amazing, and that’s our goal with both bread and writing, not loaded with everything in the pantry, necessarily, sometimes simple and elegant, but always pulled off with attention to detail and timing.
Some of what to expect from us in the coming year:
- More Author Talk events. We started in a measured way with our weekend afternoon Author Talk events, hosting memorable discussions with Cara Black and Bronwen Hruska, Mark Ulriksen, and Bruce Jenkins and David Davis, all warm, highly enjoyable gatherings, and in 2016 we’ll move forward with a full slate of monthly Author Talk events from March to October, starting with novelists Ruth Galm and Mary Volmer at 2 o’clock on Saturday, March 19.
- More writing fellowships: In early January we’ll be announcing a major new monthly writing fellowship here at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, which will be geared toward writers pursuing book projects at the intersection of food and health and will include a $5,000 stipend and $500 travel allowance. The fellowships will take place in June and September; each of those months, one writer will be chosen to be in residence with us, living in the Zen Suite, to focus full time on the writing project, also taking part in Tuesday Night Open-Mic night and enjoying private time on our trails through the redwoods to help the writing along. We’ll be developing other fellowships over the course of the year, along with our WCR Fellowship, a monthlong fellowship we host four times a year, including in February 2016 – applications for that are due by January 8.
- More of an emphasis on writing residencies: We rolled out our Weeklong Residency for Writers in 2015, and it turned out to be popular; some visiting writers told us they could get more new writing done in a week here than they could in months of toil elsewhere. Some count the days until they can return for a second writing residencies. We’ve also added an Emerging Writer Residency, a two-week stay with one hour of garden work a day.
- Monthly WCR Interviews with authors and others in publishing: We started out slow on this front, too, to test the waters, and were very pleased with the impact we had with long interviews with novelists Madison Smartt Bell and Ruth Galm. Coming in January, an interview with New Yorker magazine fiction editor Deborah Treisman, and every month after that we’ll check in with a new discussion, focusing in part on the development of a writer, on the creative process and on some nuts-and-bolts-of-writing type questions.
- More books: Wellstone Books was proud to follow up on Holy Toledo, our first full-fledged book, with three more titles in 2015, A Book of Walks by Bruce Bochy, which was a fixture on the San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller List, One Body Massage by Grace Ku, featured in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and Kiss the Sky. We’ll be taking a step forward in 2016 with half a dozen titles, including our first novel, VietnamEazy by Trami Nguyen Cron; the second in our “Music That Changed My Life” series, Bruce Jenkins’ Shop Around: Growing Up With Motown in a Sinatra Household; the complete edition of Night Running: A Book of Essays About Breaking Through, featuring a dozen essays, emphasizing female voices; and an untitled book all about Bookshop Santa Cruz and its fascinating history, the first in our “Support Your Local Independent” series, which we’ll publish in October 2015.
- A relaunch of Steve’s Weekly Blog – Now that we’ve developed more momentum as a writers’ retreat center and publishing venture, the blog will focus mostly on writers, writing and creativity, and I’ll check in once a week, posting on Thursdays. We’re starting a mailing list for people who’d like to be sent the blog each week when it posts (see the form below).
– Steve Kettmann