In the October/November 2009 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle (Vol. 42, Number 2) readers have an opportunity to learn more about Duff Brenna, author of the contemporary American classic, The Book of Mamie, re-issued by Wordcraft of Oregon. Brenna is the author of six published novels and is the Fiction Editor of the on-line literary magazine, Perigee www.perigee-arts.com .  The interview reveals a writer of breadth and deep understanding of the human condition.

The interview was conducted by another Wordcraft of Oregon author, Thomas E. Kennedy, whose novel, In The Company of Angels, will be released in March 2010 by Bloomsbury Books and another scheduled for the following year. Bloomsbury has indicated the desire to publish all four of Kennedy’s Copenhagen Quartet. In The Company of  Angels was originally published as Greene’s Summer by the Ireland publisher, Wynkin de Worde. The Bloomsbury edition recently received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6701098.html 

Wordcraft of Oregon has published four of Thomas E. Kennedy’s books and we’re thrilled to see him finally get the attention he so richly deserves. Duff Brenna has two books either near completion or being circulated, the memoir Dancing With Mother and a new novel, Separation Anxiety.

We are blessed to have a relationship with these two great writers.

The 2009 Washington State Book Awards have been announced. This is the 43rd year for the award which is given to a book based on the strength of the publication’s literary merit, lasting importance and overall quality. It was formerly called the Governor’s Writers Awards.

White Jade and Other Stories by Alex Kuo was a finalist in the fiction category.

All About Lulu, Jonathan Evison won the fiction award.

Other finalists were:

Guernica, Dave Boling

Oxygen, Carol Casselia

The Other, David Guterson

The 2009 Washington State Book Awards are sponsored by the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library. Authors will be honored at a public ceremony at 7 p.m. Wednesday, October 14th, at a public ceremony at the Seattle Public Library, at the Central Library branch, in the Microsoft Auditorium. The event, which is presented in partnership with the Elliott Bay Book Co., will feature remarks and readings by the award recipients. Books will be available for purchase and a reception and book signing will follow the program.

Wordcraft of Oregon is proud to announce that Leslie What’s story collection, Crazy Love, was named a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in fiction (the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction).

Other finalists were:

Miriam Gershow, The Local News (Spiegel & Grau)

Gina Ochsner, The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (Portobello Books)

Barbara Pope, Cezanne’s Quarry (Pegasus Books)

Jon Raymond, Livability: Stories (Bloomsbury)

The fiction this year was judged by Robert Olmstead. The winner will be announced at the Oregon Book Awards ceremony, which takes place Monday, October 26, 2009 at the Gerding Theater at the Armory. Tom Bissell will hose and tickets aare available at www.brownpapertickets.com

Congratulations to all the finalists. More information on finalists for other categories can be found at the Literary Arts, Inc. website www.literary-arts.org and www.paperfort.blogsppot.com

John Griswold has won the Delta Award from Friends of the Morris Library (Southern Illinois University-Carbondale) in recognition of an individual or organization that has written/published about southern Illinois with distinction. This recognition is primarily for his novel, A Democracy of Ghosts. Griswold joins such luminaries as John Gardner, Paul Simon and Robert Coover in winning this award. Congratulations, John!

                                                                                    Media/Blogger Contact:

openbookalliancepress@yahoo.com

DIVERSE COALITION UNITES TO COUNTER

GOOGLE BOOK SETTLEMENT

Library Scholar Peter Brantley and Antitrust Expert Gary Reback Spearhead Open Book Alliance to Protect Consumers and Competition in the Emerging Digital Book Market

SAN FRANCISCO, August 26, 2009 – Librarians, legal scholars, authors, publishers, and technology companies today announced the formation of a coalition that will counter the proposed Google Book Settlement in its current form. The proposed settlement is between Google, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and the Authors’ Guild. Approval of the settlement plan currently is pending before the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The deal is also currently being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department on antitrust grounds.

“Just as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press more than 700 years ago ushered in a new era of knowledge sharing, the mass digitization of books promises to once again revolutionize how we read and discover books,” said Open Book Alliance co-chairs Peter Brantley and Gary Reback in a blog post at http://www.openbookalliance.org.  “But a digital library controlled by a single company and small group of colluding publishers would inevitably lead to higher prices and subpar service for consumers, libraries, scholars, and students.” 

“The public interest demands that any mass book digitization and distribution effort be undertaken in the open, grounded in sound public policy, and mindful of the need to promote long-term benefits for consumers rather than those of a few commercial interests,” continued Brantley and Reback.

Brantley is a director of the non-profit Internet Archive and Reback is a noted antitrust attorney who serves of counsel at the firm Carr & Ferrell, LLP.

Members of the Open Book Alliance include:

·        Amazon (amazon.com)

·        American Society of Journalists and Authors (asja.org)

·        Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (clmp.org)

·        Internet Archive (archive.org)

·        Microsoft (microsoft.com)

·        New York Library Association (nyla.org)

·        Small Press Distribution (spdbooks.org)

·        Special Libraries Association (sla.org)

·        Yahoo! (yahoo.com)

The Alliance will work to inform policymakers and the public about the serious legal, competitive, and policy issues in the settlement proposal.

In 2005, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Authors’ Guild filed suit against Google, objecting to the company’s mass digitization of millions of books on copyright violation grounds. The parties privately settled for $125 million and devised a scheme that would permit Google to charge libraries and consumers for access to the digitized books. Under the deal, Google, the Authors Guild and the AAP would gain significant new powers to control the fledgling market for digital books.

The New York court considering the settlement has established a Sept. 4 deadline for submissions on the settlement and indicated it planned to make a final decision on Oct. 7.

Following are quotes from some members of the Open Book Alliance on their concerns about the proposed settlement:

“The library community in New York is concerned by the ramifications of this settlement on libraries, their patrons and the common good.  Access, affordability and patron privacy issues are key concerns of ours that we do not believe have been adequately addressed so far. A public policy issue of this magnitude should be not be handled in this matter, but by Congress in a deliberative and open format that allows for greater input from concerned parties and the public.” — Michael J. Borges, Executive Director of the New York Library Association.

“We look forward to the day when a completely electronic, searchable, and universally accessible repository of digital books brings untold value and knowledge to individuals, organizations and libraries. In the meantime, we are greatly concerned about Google’s efforts here, and we believe that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) must look into the full ramifications of this settlement on issues of copyright, access, affordability and privacy.” – Janice R. Lachance, CEO, Special Libraries Association. 

“We’re seeing Google the Good morph into Google the Grabby in all of this. First, Google dangles the prospect of a huge, accessible, digital library in front of us.  But then it shows utter contempt for the people who wrote the books, by scanning them without the approval of copyright holders.  Google didn’t mind stomping on authors to get this project going. If the settlement goes through as it stands, sheer marketplace domination will mean every author will have to swallow the rules set down by a cabal of a registry board or sell no digital books or future, new digital inventions.” – Salley Shannon, President, American Society of Journalists and Authors.

The Open Book Alliance will add its voice and those of its members, to other organizations and noted individuals who have publically expressed concerns about the settlement

The Open Book Alliance can be found online at http://www.openbookalliance.org, and on Twitter @OBAlliance.

Wordcraft of Oregon received news today that Ellen Waterston’s book, Between Desert Seasons, was selected as the winner of the 2009 Willa Award for Poetry from Women Writing the West and representing the best of 2008 published literature for women’s stories set in the American West.

Chosen by professional librarians, historians, and university affiliated educators, the winning authors and their books will be honored at the 15th Annual Conference, to be held at the University of California, Los Angeles, Conference Center, September 11 – 13, 2009.

Winners in other categories included:

Contemporary Fiction: Last Cowgirl, by Jana Richman (William Morrow/HarperCollins

Creative Nonfiction: Salt in Our Blood: The Memoir of a Fisherman’s Wife, by Michele Longo Eder (Dancing Moon Press)

Scholarly Nonfiction: Full-Court Quest: The Girls From Fort Shaw Indian School, Basketball Champions of theWorld, by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith (University of Oklahoma)

Historical Fiction: Charley’s Choice: The Life and Times of Charley Parkhurst, by Fern J. Hill (Infinity Publishing)

Original Softcover Fiction (Trade or Mass Market): Buffalo Bill’s Defunct: A Latouche County Mystery, by Sheila Simonson (Perseverance Press/John Daniel and Co.)

Children’s/Young Adult Fiction & Nonfiction: Dreams on the Oregon Trail, by Barbara Linsley (Whitehall Publishing)

WWW will be seeking entries for the 2010 Willa Literary Awards, honoring books published in 2009. The deadline for submission is February 1, 2010.

WWW is a non-profit association of writers and other literature oriented professionals, writing and promoting the Women’s West. Membership is open to any person worldwide who shares these interests. For more information about the WILLA Awards, Women Writing the West, or the 15th Annual Conference, please visit: womenwritingthewestdotorg, or write c/o Joyce Lohse, WWW Adminstrator, 8547 E. Arapahoe Rd. #J-541, Greenwood Village, CO 80112-1436

The July reading in Stayton’s Second Sundays Series of Poetry Readings, to be held Sunday, July 12, will feature a poet from western Oregon, Margaret Chula of Portland, and one from eastern, David Memmott of La Grande, both reading from unusual new books and, as part of the series’ continuing celebration of Oregon’s sesquicentennial, from past or elder Oregon poets who have influenced them. The reading will take place from 3 to 5 p.m. in the studio of artist Paul Toews at 349 N. Third Ave., where it shares space with the Stayton Friends of the Library Used Bookstore. Admission will be free; donations are appreciated. Books by both featured poets will be for sale at the reading, and they will sign copies. Audience members are invited to bring one or two short poems to share during an open part of the reading.

Margaret Chula will read poems in the voices of Japanese Americans in World War II internment camps—poems written in a cross-arts collaboration with quilt artist Cathy Erickson. These poems are collected, and the corresponding quilts by Erickson are beautifully reproduced, in their book What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment Camps, just released by Katsura Press. The book also contains historical photos and texts, as well as accounts by Chula and Erickson of the inspiration and process from which their works emerged. Chula is steeped in Japanese culture, having lived for 12 years in Kyoto, where she studied the Japanese traditional arts of woodblock printing and flower arranging, as well as teaching creative writing. Her work in the Japanese poetic forms of haiku and tanka has garnered many awards and is collected in several earlier books—Grinding My Ink (1993), This Moment (1995), Always Filling, Always Full (2001), The Smell of Rust (2003). She also co-authored, with Rich Youmans, a collection of linked haibun, Shadow Lines (2000). With the support of grants from Literary Arts and the Regional Arts and Culture Council, she has worked collaboratively with visual artists, musicians, and dancers.

David Memmott will be reading from Giving It Away, a comprehensive collection of poems written over many years, published this spring by Wordcraft of Oregon. The book’s cover art is a swirling and colorful digital work by the poet, and black and white digital pieces by him serve as frontispieces for each of the book’s eight parts. Included within those parts are poems of family, and poems of place, political poems and environmental poems, lyric poems and long narrative poems, all reflecting an expansive vision. Memmott writes and publishes both poetry and fiction, including speculative as well as realistic works. Recent work includes a chapbook of poems, Watermarked (Traprock Books, 2004); a short story collection, Shadow Bones, and a postcyberpunk novel, Primetime. Poems and stories appear in both mainstream and genre magazines and anthologies, and his speculative work has been recognized with a Rhysling Award. Memmott is editor and publisher of Wordcraft of Oregon, which has been awarded three fellowships from Literary Arts.

Now in its eighth year, Stayton’s Second Sunday Series of Poetry Readings is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Marion Cultural Development Corporation, which also provides funding for donation of featured poets’ books to the Stayton Public Library. The July 12th reading will be the last of this season. There will be no reading in August, when the series takes its annual summer vacation. Monthly readings will resume in September. For more information, contact series coordinator Eleanor Berry at 503-859-3045 or eberry@wvi.com.

PIF Magazine editor, Derek Alger, has posted his interview with Greg Herriges, author of JD: Memoir of a Time and a Journey and The Winter Dance Party Murders at http://www.pifmagazine.com/SID/917/

Two Wordcraft of Oregon titles struck gold in separate book award contests.

Katherine’s Wish, a novel by Linda Lappin, won a 2009 IPPY Award in the category of historical fiction. 2,000 independent authors and publishers entered 4,090 books in a total of 85 categories for national and regional honors, of these 3,380 books were entered in 65 national categories. Katherine’s Wish was entered in the national category. In its 13th year, the IPPY Awards were founded to recognize excellence in independent publishing.

Crazy Love, stories by Leslie What, won the 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Award, taking a gold medal in the short fiction category. Crazy Love was also a finalist in the science fiction category.

Katherine’s Wish was also Honorable Mention for an Eric Hoffer Award in the general fiction category.

We hope you’ll read these books and judge for yourself.

Wordcraft of Oregon received notice that two of our titles published in 2008 have been selected as finalists for the Eric Hoffer Award. 

Between Desert Seasons by Ellen Waterston is a finalist in the poetry category and Katherine’s Wish, a biographical novel based on the last years in the life of Katherine Mansfield, by Linda Lappin, was selected in the fiction category. (See listings on Wordcraft homepage for title descriptions). 

For more information please visit the website: www.hofferaward.com