Kitchen Table Creativity 

Zoom URL for Amanda's talk: https://bit.ly/McTigue

Novelist Amanda McTigue will share stories about the wild creativity we need to heal, to write, and to restore our spirits. As the daughter of a doctor and an Appalachian story-quilter, Amanda knows the power of connecting through stories told ‘round the kitchen table.
Amanda’s photo on the cover of The Write Spot: Writing as a Path to Healing is called “The Road Home” and conjures memories of “once upon that time . . .”

Remembering when . . .

“The Road Home” is a snapshot of the last bend in a winding one-lane road that leads up to the little mountain house where her family once lived.

As a source of inspiration, Amanda will offer tales of kitchen-table ingenuity celebrating the resourcefulness “ordinary” people use in extraordinary circumstances. She’ll also bring along at least one of her mother’s story quilts, weaving in threads from her debut novel, Going to Solace, and her coming novel, The Cautionary Tales. 

Amanda McTigue’s short stories have earned her a Pushcart Prize nomination, and a Semifinalist nod from the American Literary Review fiction contest.

Her debut novel Going to Solace was named a Best Read of 2012 by public radio KRCB’s “Word by Word.”

Her written works for the stage have been produced at Carnegie Hall, the Minnesota Opera, and Sonoma County’s Green Music Center.

She’s currently editing her second novel, The Cautionary Tales. More at amandamctigue.com.

 

Kate Farrell

Kate Farrell is a storyteller, author, librarian, and founder of the Word Weaving Storytelling Project. She has published numerous educational materials on storytelling. She has contributed to and edited award-winning anthologies of personal narrative.

SF Senior Beat article about Kate's adventures as a teacher/storyteller in San Francicso and how her word weaving project began.

Keep up with Kate and her many events to promote storytelling on her website.

Learn more about storytelling and the many facets of the oral tradition on her blog.  

Lisa Alpine is a renowned dance teacher, travel writer, and author of Dance Life: Movin’ & Groovin’ Around the Globe, Wild Life: Travel Adventures of a Worldly Woman and Exotic Life: Travel Tales of an Adventurous Woman.

Her award-winning, dynamically delicious stories grace the pages of many anthologies, including Travelers’ Tales Best Travel Writing.

When not wrestling with words, exploring the ecstatic realms of dance, swimming with sea creatures, or waiting for a flight, Lisa divides her time between Mill Valley, California and the Big Island of Hawai’i, where Pele’s lava licks at the edges of her writing retreat. Read her timely posts about travel, dance, writing, culture, and inspiration.

 

Mary Mackey

Mary Mackey became a writer by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, dodging machine gun fire, being swarmed by army ants, making catastrophic decisions about men, and reading.

Her published works consist of fourteen novels including The Village of Bones, which won a 2018 CIIS Women’s Spirituality Book Award from the Department of Diversity and Inclusion; The Year The Horses Came; and A Grand Passion, which was translated into 12 foreign languages and made The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle best seller lists. She is also the author of eight collections of poetry including Sugar Zone, which won the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award; and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, which won the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for the Best Book Published by a Small Press.

Her work has been praised by Wendell Berry, Pat Conroy, Jane Hirshfield, D. Nurkse, Al Young, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Marge Piercy for its beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range.

Professor Emeritus and Former Writer in Residence at California State University, Sacramento, she received her B.A. from Harvard and her PhD from the University of Michigan.

Mary presently lives in northern California with her husband Angus Wright. Follow Mary on Twitter @MMackeyAuthor. To be the first to know when she publishes a new novel or collection of poems you can subscribe to her quarterly newsletter.

 

Kate Farrell is a storyteller, author, librarian, and founder of the Word Weaving Storytelling Project. She has published numerous educational materials on storytelling. She has contributed to and edited award-winning anthologies of personal narrative.

SF Senior Beat article about Kate's adventures as a teacher/storyteller in San Francicso and how her word weaving project began.

Keep up with Kate and her many events to promote storytelling on her website.

Learn more about storytelling and the many facets of the oral tradition on her blog.  

Waights Taylor Jr., born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama and has lived in Sonoma County for twenty-three years. When his professional career was coming to an end, he turned to writing and publishing. His first book was the non-fiction, award-winning Our Southern Home: Scottsboro to Montgomery to Birmingham—The Transformation of the South in the Twentieth Century (October 2011). His next book and first novel, also an award winner, was the first book in a murder mystery trilogy entitled Kiss of Salvation (August 2014). The second book in the trilogy was Touch of Redemption (March 2016). The final book in the trilogy was Heed the Apocalypse (November 2017), also an award winner. His next book was a young adult novel, Henry Tuttle: The Boy Who Loved to Run. (April 2019). He is working on his sixth novel, tentatively titled Nevermore. It is set in Alabama in the years 1949 and 2001. Taylor’s publishing company is McCaa Books. The company’s website features Taylor’s five books, and twenty-five other books he has published for local authors.

Bev Scott specialized in serving executives and managers as a leadership coach and organizational consultant for over thirty-seven years. She taught organization psychology and founded The 3rd Act, a program whose mission supports positive aging. As she moved into her own third act, she wanted more time to pursue other interests. She began a genealogical journey to uncover the details of her paternal grandparents’ lives and explore the rumored family secret’s. She concluded that the story needed to be told as fiction using the known facts as her framework.

Sarah’s Secret: A Western Tale of Betrayal and Forgiveness, Bev’s debut novel, is the culmination of her long-held desire to tell this family story with the rumored secrets about her grandfather.

Bev previously published non-fiction work, including the second edition of “Consulting on the Inside,” which she co-authored with Kim Barnes, in 2011. She has written numerous professional articles and contributed to “70 Things to Do When You Turn 70,” edited by Ronnie Sellers and Mark Chimsky. Bev blogs on several sites, including her own, “The Writing Life.”

Bev enjoys traveling, visiting with friends, volunteering, reading and spending time with her grandsons. She lives with her spouse in San Francisco.  Now during Covid 19, her joys are limited to what can be done inside, socially distanced or on Zoom.