August: Our annual barbeque at Edie and Jim Matthew's was a great afternoon of grilling and chilling with new friends and old.

See the video on YouTube! Are you famous yet?

July: Dahr Jamail, international journalist

Jamail's book Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist In Occupied Iraq is endorsed by Stephen Kinzer (former NY Times foreign desk chief; author of bestsellers All The Shah's Men and Overthrow) and has a foreword by Amy Goodman (host of Democracy Now and co-author of Exception to The Rulers and Standing Up to The Madness).

Websites:
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/
http://beyondthegreenzone.org/

June: Tim Myer is an author, storyteller, songwriter, and poet. All nine of his children's books have received strong reviews. Basho and the River Stones was a Junior Library Guild starred selection, a Scholastic Book Clubs selection, and a California Young Readers Medal nominee.

A classroom teacher and university lecturer for many years, Tim currently teaches at Santa Clara University and makes the rounds of schools and events as a guest author and storyteller.

May: Michele Simon is a public health lawyer who has been working as a nutrition advocate since 1996, specializing in legal strategies and food industry tactics.

She is the author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, which Library Journal calls an essential purchase and recommends as a follow-up to Fast Food Nation and Food Politics. Marion Nestle has made Appetite for Profit required reading for her nutrition students at NYU. Michele is currently the Research and Policy Director for the Marin Institute, an alcohol industry watchdog based in San Rafael , CA..

Michele Simon's website

April: Jess Wells talked about the bane and boon of historical fiction. Wells' latest book, "The Mandrake Broom" dramatizes the fight to save medical knowledge during the witch-burning times in Europe, 1465-1540, and is the result of years of research into the social, political and medical communities of the times.

Jess Wells is the author of 13 volumes of work, including three novels and five books of short stories.  A winner of a San Francisco Art Commission Grant for Literature and a three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, she is included in more than two dozen literary anthologies and journals, university curricula, and European publications.

Wells' books and short stories are available at her website.
Her podcasts are available at http://www.redroom.com/author/jess-wells.

March: Matilda Butler wrote the award-winning book Women and the Mass Media, has contributed chapters to books about women in education and work, published over 50 articles on women, directed a Federal communication program for women, and lectured on issues affecting women since the 1970s.

She is co-author of Rosie’s Daughters: The “First Woman To” Generation Tells Its Story, the collective memoir of female “ration-stamp babies” born between 1940 and 1945. She has initiated work on A Time of One’s Own: Writing a Woman’s Memoir in One Year.

Matilda Butler’s website

February: Challenges and Opportunities - An Editor's View with Alan Rinzler

Alan Rinzler began as a book editor in 1962 at Simon and Schuster where he was Editorial Assistant to the legendary Robert Gottlieb. He was also West Coast Editor for the Grove Press, Editor of the Berkeley Monthly, and for the past 15 years Executive Editor of Jossey-Bass, an imprint of John Wiley & Sons. Alan has edited and published such authors as Toni Morrison, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Shirley MacLaine, Robert Ludlum, Jerzy Kosinski, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Irv Yalom, Clive Cussler, and others.

Rinzler is Academic Director of Trade Book Publishing for the annual Stanford Professional Publishing Courses at Stanford University, and lives in Berkeley, where he worked for many years in community mental health on the Berkeley Police Department Mobile Crisis Team.

Alan's website: www.alanrinzler.com

January Workshop

Plot diva, Martha Alderson, conducted a workshop in how to develop blockbuster plots. She helped us explore the relationship between characterization and plot with a simple visual technique that helps develop and track scenes. Martha Alderson, MA, teaches plot writing workshops privately, through UC Santa Cruz, and at writers conferences and writing salons. She is the author of Blockbuster Plots Pure and Simple. Martha's website