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Joan Anderman was our first WCR Monthlong Writing Fellow, spending August 2014 with us in the Library House, and setting the bar high: Joan’s a smart writer and a great listener who had long conversations with us and our residents and also pursued her writing with commitment and intensity. Soon after leaving, Joan wrote us: During these past seven days many people have asked me to describe my experience there. I tell them, of course, about how much progress I made on my book, about my simple, beautiful cabin and the power of solitude as a creative conduit. I came to the Wellstone to write, and write I did. But I left the Wellstone with more than a fistful of chapters. I left as part of a creative community, a community of dreamers and strivers dedicated to nourishing mind, body, and spirit with, simply put, what matters. Ideas and encouragement. Garden vegetables and fresh goat’s milk. Hikes through the forest. Honest conversation. Progress can be measured in many ways, and I measure mine in terms of words written, to be sure, but also bonds forged. I don’t know how I got so lucky. I do know how much I’m looking forward to going back.“

That was a pivotal time for Joan. She’d left her job as pop music critic for the Boston Globe after many years and was working on a book about creativity and middle age. She was also living out her ideas: After years of writing about other people making music, she was ready to make her own – and since leaving us, she’s been on quite a roll with her band, Field Day, putting out CDs and touring regularly. As she wrote in May 2016 at social media: “My schedule used to revolve around shows I was covering but now it revolves around shows I’m playing.”

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We’d have had to invent Wallace Baine if he didn’t already exist. Wallace has been writing for the Santa Cruz Sentinel since 1991, becoming a fixture in the community for his insightful, sensitive coverage of the arts. He’s not just a reporter, he’s a writer, a very fine writer, in short the perfect person to author the first in our “Support Your Local Independent” series from Wellstone Books, A Light in the Midst of Darkness: The Story of a Community, a Bookshop, and True Love. In his book, Wallace passionately tells his readers of the history of Bookshop Santa Cruz, but it’s more than that. Wallace explains just how deep rooted Bookshop is in the town’s history and sense of community. The book is a celebration of community, of books, and of the survival of a family and small business through the past 50 years which have threatened to eliminate everything that isn’t streamlined and electronic. We published A Light in the Midst of Darkness in conjunction with the 50^th Anniversary of Santa Cruz Bookshop.

Wallace has been to Wellstone for a couple of Author Talks, most recently his own. We had Wallace and the owners of Bookshop Santa Cruz Neal and Casey Coonerty, along with Thad Nodine the first winner of the Book Shop Santa Cruz 2 Week Residency at the Wellstone Center, and Steve Palopoli, editor of Good Times, all together in one room to talk about Bookshop and it’s impact on everyone and their own stories.

We’re big Cara Black fans here at WCR and are happy to turn other people on to this delightful writer. We love books that bring alive a sense of place, and Cara’s Aimee LeDuc mystery novels, each set in a different arrondisement in Paris, do that with panache and fun.

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Angie Chuang gives hope to former journalists trying to make the transition to book writing. A weeklong writer-in-residence with us in November 2016, she …

Trami Nguyen Cron is the author of the very first novel that we published here at Wellstone. Her book, VietnamEazy stood out to us as an important story to tell. Trami writes about her experience as Vietnamese-American and the implications of crossing between two extremely different cultures and finding a way to exist in both. Her book tackles a lot, from finding balance between past and present to the universally complex mother-daughter relationship. What’s really awesome is that the story is told in the context of food…yep, food.  We all know is a powerful component of family, home, and history, and to see the lines so clearly drawn between the dynamics of life and the dynamics of food is pretty amazing.  We were very proud to have helped to share Trami’s unique stories and even a few Vietnamese recipes which can be found scattered throughout the book.

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Lillian Daniel

David Davis is a sportswriter and author of Waterman: The Life andTimes of Kahanamoku, a biography on the very first Olympic swimming champion. The subject matter of this book, the tale of a “waterman,” definitely calls to readers in the Santa Cruz community, most of whom are more than enthusiastic about everything ocean related. We had David here to participate in an Author’s Talk with another passionate sports-writer, Bruce Jenkins.

Marley Klaus Dowling

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Kathleen Founds is kind of like a superhero.  She’s writes children’s books, she writes creative novels, she writes comics, she writes essays, so I guess what I mean is she’s a literary super hero. Do you remember those books we used to read when we were kids, the mystery novels that are written in letters, ransom notes, correspondences, newspaper clippings, etc? Those ones where people had names like “Walter Russ” and “Goldie Fisch.” I just did a little searching and found out that they are called “Epistolary Novels” and that I’m actually thinking of a specific one: Regarding the Fountain by Kate Klise.  Those novels were genius, in my opinion.  They got right into it, down to what happens behind closed doors, what happens when people talk directly to each other and not through the mysterious all knowing narrator. You really get to know these people.  Now that’s the children’s version.  Kathleen Founds did us all an enormous favor and wrote a book like that, you know, the fun kind, for adults.  It’s not exactly the same. Kathleen Founds novel is told through diary entries, correspondences between characters, cookbook excerpts, what she calls, “logical proofs,” etc.  It is a book that deals with some seriously taxing stuff…And it’s funny as hell. Kathleen was here with us along with Mary Roach a few months ago for an Authors Talk.  The two of them share that special talent for talking about serious stuff in terms that wont make us all want to cry forever or die.  It was awesome to have them.

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We’re want to sing a high praise for Matt Gallagher. He’s an author with a voice on a subject that is all too relevant to all of us: war, and specifically, the war in Iraq. It’s easy to think of war and forget that every single person involved is full and alive and have to personally witness what we only hear about, only guess about. This is why Matt’s voice is so utterly important.
Matt wrote his first book Kaboom in 2010. This book is non-fiction, it’s his experience in the Iraq war, written in real time.  It actually started as a blog that was taken down by the government.  Matt’s most recent work though, and what has been earning him well deserved praise and encouragement, is his first novel, Youngblood which is a fictional story that helps people to see what American soldiers in the Iraq wore were experiencing.  We were lucky enough to be able to interview Matt (look his interview up on our homepage, it’s worth a read, Matt is great to talk to) and he also joined us for an Authors Talk with Viet Thanh Nguyen. We are really excited for Matt’s and look forward to watching his voice grow.

Ruth Weir Galm

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Bronwen Hruska

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Bruce Jenkins is a writer and sports journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he has been covering sports news for 30 years.  Bruce grew up in Malibu in a very musical household which lead to the creation of a book we published by Bruce called Shop Around. This book, part of our “Music That Changed My Life” series, is about Bruce’s experience in growing up with the famous composer, Gordon Jenkins, for a father.  He grew up around the greats, Billy Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and many more musicians colored his life. Now, Bruce still works for the Chronicle. Bruce has written several other books including North Shore Chronicles: Big Wave Surfing in Hawaii, A good Man: The Pete Newell Story, and Goodbye: In Search of Gordon Jenkins.   He has covered major sports events including 27 World Series and has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer prize.  We had Bruce here for an AuthorsTalk with David Davis and hope to see him again soon.

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Gary Kamiya

Samuel Kolawole

Grace Ku is the author of One Body Massage, a book we were proud to publish in 2014. One Body Massage is an important book that offers a different kind of solution (you know, besides drinking or screaming or running away forever) to dealing with the stresses of life and relationships. Grace describes an acute understanding of those pressures, and offers a way to relieve them through touch and massage. The book is a guide through massage therapy and techniques, complete with cut out instruction cards with pictures and peaceful words to help with the process.

Grace has offered massage workshops here at Wellstone in the past and currently offers private sessions where she lives in Santa Cruz. She also lead a workshop at Luma, a family yoga center in Santa Cruz, called the 1+1=1 workshop, and plans to lead another in 2017 which you guys should definitely check out.

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Ben LeRoy has been with us twice, most recently as a WCR Fellow in October.  Ben is a cofounder of Tyrus Books which has recently been acquired by Simon and Schuste.  Tyrus books started with putting out mainly crime novels, but began to expand with other types of fiction as the company developed. Ben credited the change in subjects to being conscious of what kind of story he wants to put out into the increasingly violent world. He’s a really caring guy with a sense of humor. (try visiting his website: benjaminleroy.com ). We definitely hope to have him join us again.

Michael McGehee

Emily Mitchell

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Viet Thanh Nguyen

Thad Nodine has worked as a journalist, as a speech writer, as a teacher, and a novelist.  His work in creative fiction is what made us lucky enough to be able to host him as the first winner of the Bookshop Santa Cruz sponsored Residency. Thad’s first novel, Touch and Go came out in 2011. He is now at work on his second novel.  We’re excited to have him around, he’s a constructive presence and a hard worker and excited to see what he creates next. We hope his time here has a very positive impact on his new book.  You can read more about Thad and about his first novel in  this article that Wallace Baine wrote for the Santa Cruz Sentinal:(http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/general-news/20110922/touch-and-go-thad-nodines-vision-quest)

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Mary Roach is an awesome lady, there’s no other way to put it.  She is the kind of person that reminds us that there truly is no universal rule that states that we can’t all be scientists, that certain topics should be left to the experts and that we should leave it to them.  Mary totally debunks this.  She graduated with a bachelor’s degree (no, not a Phd or Masters) in psychology at Wesleyan University and went on to get a job in PR at the San Francisco Zoo, become a journalist and freelance editor, give a TED Talk and (here’s where it gets really exciting) make a living as a seriously versatile author.  Mary has written books on the science of sex, the challenges of life in outer space, the life of cadavers, how much it takes to burst a human stomach, and, most recently what she calls, “the curious science of humans at war”.  

Ethel Rohan was a wonderful first recipient of the Joe Plumeri Fellowship. She is a writer from Ireland who now lives in San Francisco.  Ethel was a wonderful first recipient of the Joe Plumeri Fellowship, which she received for her new book, The Weight of Him,  a story of a man who struggling with his weight and with the tragic loss of his son.  Ethel spent her time here at Wellstone working on the final edits of this novel, which comes out in February. We asked Ethel what she had been up to since her stay here and she wrote:

It’s a little over two months to the publication of my first novel,
_The Weight of Him_. The focus and serenity I enjoyed at the Wellstone
Center are slippery states now as February 14, 2017 draws nearer. I’m
excited of course, but also nervous and restless. I keep grasping at
calm and faith but I can’t quite hold onto them. There’s a lot of
work and angst involved in trying to get word of a book into the world
and to get that book into readers’ hands! A walk in the woods is
seeking me.                                                                                                                                                                         … 
My month stay at The Wellstone Center back in June, thanks to a generous Plumeri Fellowship, remains my one and only residency to date, but it will not be my last. I am forever grateful for the hallowed time and gorgeous space Wellstone afforded me to complete the final edits on my first novel. _The Weight of Him_ was made all the better by my
productive and unforgettable time there.

Since leaving us, Ethel has started work on her second book, The Other Side of the World, a story about an Irish Immigrant.  She’s had to take a break from writing to put all of her energy into promoting her first book for now, but we’re very excited for her February when The Weight of Him will be released and out in the world and she will get to do some more writing.

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MorganEve Swain

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Michael Takeuchi has been with us twice as a weeklong writer in residence, most recently in November 2016, and we’re proud to say we’ve helped shape his work on a remarkable project: a book capturing the spirit, and many of the stories, of his late uncle, who was one of many Japanese Americans interned during World War II and learned during that time to dance, an art form that led him to travel the world and develop many remarkable friendships.

David Talbot is a passionate writer and founder of the online magazine, Salon.  David definitely has a knack for media,politics, and history, all of which seep out in his books which include a book on the Kennedys’, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy years, and The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.  We were happy to have David here at Wellstone to do
an Authors Talk with Gary Kamiya, a co-founder of Salon.  David talked about his book, Season of the Witch Enchantment Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love, a book that walks it’s readers through the tumultuous recent history of San Francisco.

Meng Tan, longtime “Jolly Good Fellow” at Google, whose job description there was “to work for world peace,” helped inspire us to found the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods. Steve moderated two panels at the World Peace Festival in Berlin in August 2011, including one with Meng, and the two became friends. Meng introduced us to Grace Ku, whose book OneBody Massage we were proud to publish in November 2015, and in August 2014 we had an Author Talk event here featuring the two of them that was great fun and inspiring, not long after Meng published his first book, the NYT bestseller Search Inside Yourself. In 2016 he published .

Nick Taylor (left) was a great guy – a historical fiction guy – a Michael Shaara Prize winning, literary novel guy.  Nick wrote a couple books, Father Junipero’s Confessor and The Disagreement, and was doing pretty well for himself. That is until he became T.T. Monday (for any detectives out there, resist the urge to go searching for the meaning of his first name, T.T. doesn’t stand for anything in particular) and found his calling…Baseball Thrillers. If you’re curious about his motive for this change, he’s got some pretty blunt answers for you in this article: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/blogs/p/2014/02/24/who-is-tt-monday–the-story-of-a-novel-part-3.  T.T. published his first novel, The Setup Man, in 2014 and has since published a second book in the Johnny Adcock Series, called Double Switch. Honestly just looking at the cover of these books makes you feel pretty suspenseful.

(T.T. Monday pictured above)

As if he weren’t taking enough on what with the double identity and the major genre switch, Nick is also a professor of English at San Jose State University and the director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.  He’s also been very good to us here at Wellstone.  We had Nick/T.T. here for an Authors Talk with Cara Black back in April to talk about their books (Cara is also a mystery series writer).  He has also helped us by recommending a few of our past Wellstone interns.  We’re glad to know him.

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Mark Ulriksen

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Mary Volmer is a writer from Grass Valley, California.  Before she became a writer, she dreamed of being a famous basketball player…Personally we’re glad she went the author route.  So far she has published two books, Crown of Dust and Reliance, Illinois.  She’s visited Wellstone to join us for an Authors Talk with Ruth Galm. Her latest book, Reliance Illinois, follows a young woman with a birthmark covering half her face through her American life in 1864.

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Michael Weinreb, a sports journalist and the author of a few books including The Kings of New York and A Season of Saturdays, spent time with us at Wellstone as one of our WCR Fellows. He stayed for a month in the Library House and, in addition to writing, made good use of the walking trails that we have running through the redwoods and enjoyed the company of the other residents of the Wellstone Center.

In a Santa Cruz Sentinel article that Wallace Baine wrote about the Wellstone Center, Michael said about his time here: “Creatively, it’s been amazing…You just have so much time to work.”

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