Presenters
Joyce Boatright (Conroe, TX) has been writing and teaching memoir since 1990. She facilitates an OWL group at Lone Star College-North Harris, now in its sixth year, and serves on the SCN board of directors. She is author of Telling Your Story: A Basic Guide to Memoir Writing.
Presentation: "Once Upon a Time: Family Stories"
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Nita Lou Bryant (Austin TX) lives in Austin, Texas and writes fiction, personal essay, memoir, and two blogs. Her most recent writing award was winning the 2009 Mozelle Memoir Contest for "Seventeen Snowsuits." During her only child's freshman year of college (2008-2009), Nita Lou was a regular contributor to the parenting column in the Austin American-Statesman. She is currently working on a novel. Visit her website.
Panelist: "Finding Our Voices Online"
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Laurie Wagner Buyer (Llano, TX) is the author of four collections of poetry, Glass-eyed Paint in the Rain, Red Colt Canyon, Across the High Divide, and Infinite Possibilities: A Haiku Journal, a novel, Side Canyons, and a memoir, Spring's Edge: A Ranch Wife's Chronicles. Another memoir, When I Came West, is forthcoming in January 2010. When not on the road presenting workshops, Laurie lives in Llano, Texas. Visit her website.
Panelist: "Getting Published"
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Heather Summerhayes Cariou (West New York, NJ) is the author of the memoir, Sixtyfive Roses. She was a founding member of the Center for Actor's Study in Toronto and enjoyed a 20-year professional acting career. She is currently working on a novel and co-producing the feature film "Make Believe" with her husband, actor Len Cariou. Visit her website.
Presentation: "Panning for Gold: Using Imagery and Metaphor to Enrich Your Memoir"
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Rhonda Esakov (Georgetown, TX) is a Tax Specialist who has written a book, newsletters and articles for business periodicals. She also is an Outdoors Educator who teaches mainly for Youth Organizations and Parks & Wildlife Agencies; she also writes articles for outdoor magazines with a recent feature in Backwoodsman. Currently she is working on a collection of short stories (such as the one she has in SCN's Kitchen Table Stories) and her memoir about the Middle East. For a taste of her various writings (and recipes), you can visit her blog.
Panelist: "Finding Our Voices Online"
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Dawn Espelage (Vinton, VA) is the author of Life Lines: Celebrate Your Journey. Dawn is a Certified Journal Instructor through The Center of Journal Therapy and has worked in the social work field for 13 years. Visit her website.
Presentation: "Celebrate Your Journey"
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Pat Flathouse (Austin, TX) has been a teacher and counselor. She is the author of Your Life, Your Story, designed to help women write their stories, and also Growing Up in the Texas Panhandle, the stories of her childhood. Pat is a genealogist and has written, A Priceless Legacy, to help women write the stories of their family history. She also teaches writing workshops and enjoys traveling and playing with her grandchildren.
Presentation: "Getting the 'Picture' on Our Lives"
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Helen Ginger (Austin, TX) has written three books for TSTC Publishing and is researching and conducting interviews for a fourth. A former Executive Director of the Writers' League of Texas, she edits for fellow authors. Helen works with writers, not just on their manuscripts, but also on their search for agents and publication. In her spare time, she's Marketing Director for Legends In Our Own Minds®. You can find out more about her on her website.
Panel Moderator: "Getting Published"
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Jeanne Guy (Austin, TX) is a joyfully irreverent educator and writer who leads journal writing workshops and serves as a newbie Story Circle Network board member. A graduate of Indiana University and Leadership Austin, she left a successful 25-year career in office management and business development to pursue her current calling and is writing a book based on the 1977 kidnapping of her two oldest children. Visit her website.
Presentation: "What Are You Thinking?! Orchestrating the Chorus of Voices in Your Head"
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Linda Hoye (Auburn, WA) is an HRMS Benefits Analyst who exercises her creative side by writing. She has been published in the Story Circle Journal, the National Association of Memoir Writers Memoir Café, and her introspective piece called "The Face in the Mirror" won second prize in the "2009 Susan Wittig Albert LifeWriting Competition." Linda sits on the board of the Story Circle Network and is currently working on a memoir about adoption and her eventual reconnection with her birth-family. She maintains a blog called My Own Velvet Room.
Panel Moderator: "Finding Our Voices Online"
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Becky Lane (Wimberley, TX), though her background is in Visual Merchandising and Landscaping, is better known as Hill Country Hippie, author of the blog Seasonality: A Common Sense Guide to Living the Good Life. If not writing or gardening, you will probably find her scouting out local organic growers and producers for The Bountiful Sprout, a food buying community which she helped to organize. She lives with her husband in the Texas Hill Country, near Austin.
Panelist: "Finding Our Voices Online"
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Lianne Mercer (Fredericksburg, TX), RN, MSN, CPT (Certified Poetry Therapist) combines her love of language with story-telling in her workshops. She invites workshop participants to listen to voices (she is, after all, a psychiatric nurse), voices that point the way to what wants saying in the telling of family stories. Her use of Cinderella's story is a vehicle for discovering what questions to ask—of oneself, of a person long gone, of a child that lived a story that wants telling.
Presentation: "One Way Writing Heals: Changing the Story You Tell"
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Judy Miller (Zionsville, IN) is a freelance writer and editor living in Indiana with her husband and four children, ages eight through sixteen. She specializes in writing about adoption, parenting and special needs. Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous magazines, Pieces of Me: Who Do I Want To Be? (EMK Press, November 2009), and Cup of Comfort for Adoptive Families (Adams Media, 2009). She is one of the Story Circle Book Review editors and a columnist for the adoption network Grown in My Heart. She maintains a blog called The International Mom.
Panelist: "Finding Our Voices Online"
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Katherine Misegades (Fort Wayne, IN) has been a website designer for ten years—an extension of her 20-year career as a graphic artist. In the past three years, she has set up blogs for many of her clients. Included in her services is teaching her clients how to maintain their blogs. Visit her blog.
Presentation: "Lifewriting Online: Blogging for the Faint of Heart"
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Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D. (Richmond, CA) is the President and founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers. She is the author of the prize-winning memoir Don't Call Me Mother. Her new book, The Power of Memoir—How to Write Your Healing Story will be available in January 2010. Through her workshops, online coaching, and speaking engagements, Linda integrates the principles of healing and creativity in presenting the powerful healing process of writing true stories.
Presentation: "Structures of Memoir: The Narrative and Emotional Arcs"
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Patricia Page (Austin, TX) is the author of a novel, Hope's Cadillac, a memoir, Shadows on a Nameless Beach, and short stories published in The New Yorker, Glimmer Train, Epoch, and other publications. She has been teaching memoir-writing workshops since 2002 and is currently working on a novel based on her grandparents experiences as foolhardy missionaries in what were known then as the "Cannibal Islands."
Presentation: "Details, Details: Getting to the Heart of the Matter"
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Janet Riehl (St. Louis, MO) is an award-winning author, blogger, and conference presenter living in St. Louis. Sightlines: A Poet's Diary, told in story poems, was recently made into an audio book Sightlines: A Family Love Story in Poetry and Music. Twice selected as finalist for Poet Laureate of Lake County, California and a member of Authors Guild, her poems, stories and essays are published in national literary magazines and several anthologies. Visit her website.
Presentation: "Story-Poems: A Tool for Writing Our Stories"
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Jane Ross (Austin, TX) comes from a background in traditional book publishing and has been a professional freelance editor and publishing consultant since 1996. She edited the Story Circle Journal from 2004-08. As an active Board member and member of the SCN Publications Committee, she edited and produced SCN's 10th anniversary anthology Kitchen Table Stories and two True Words anthologies and mentored many SCN members as they developed their writing and editing skills. Over the past year, she has shifted her focus to learning the rules of the new online and digital publishing age, including social media, blogging, audio, and video, as well as continuing to work with print on demand and e-books.
Presentation: "Getting the 'Picture' on Our Lives"
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Marlene Samuels (Chicago, IL)
is an independent writer, research sociologist and lecturer. She is co-author of her mother's holocaust memoir, The Seamstress (Putnam) as well as an academic book about professional attainment. As both an immigrant and daughter of two Holocaust survivors, Marlene has been applying her professional research skills to non-fiction memoir and short story for the past 15 years. Marlene is completing Mental Health Poster Child, a collection of "memoir shorts," and is conducting research for a study about "baby boomers." Her work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Lilith, OurEcho.com, Story Circle Network's True Words Anthology, Long Story Short, ReadyMade Magazine, Hugo House, and others. She has presented at Sun Valley Writers' Conference, Spertus College, National Holocaust Museum, Brandeis University, and the Ketchum Public Library. Marlene is co-host of the Expendable Edibles website. Her awards include OurEcho.com "Family Project" award and Hugo House Writing Center's "Writing About War."
Presentation: "Research for Memoir and Why It Matters"
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Lisa Shirah-Hiers (Austin, TX) has published numerous profile pieces for austinwoman magazine, Austin Monthly, and the Story Circle Journal. Her essay "Spinning Water into Gold" appeared in What Wildness is This: Women Write about the Southwest and was reprinted in Desert Call Magazine. She is a board member, facilitator, and frequent workshop presenter of the Story Circle Network.
Presentation: "The Art of the Personal Profile: Telling Another's Story"
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Kathy Sparrow (Rio Hondo, TX)
explores the power of the narrative to shape lives, heal psychic and emotional wounds, and build bridges between people of diverse cultural backgrounds. Her memoir, On the Mother Lagoon: Fly Fishing and the Spiritual Journey (Wish Publishing, 2003), chronicles her psychospiritual development while mastering the quiet sport. A lecturer at the University of Texas-Pan American, Sparrow encourages students to become better writers through coursework designed around becoming conscious citizens and discovering one's mission in life. Visit her website or her blog.
Presentation: "Telling Your Story: From Life Experience to Personal Essay"
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Dawn Thurston (Villa Park, CA)
is the author of Breathe Life into Your Life Story: How to Write a Story People Will WANT to Read, published by Signature Books in 2007. She has taught life story writing at colleges in California and Utah for 14 years and has helped hundreds of people write and publish their personal histories. Visit her website.
Presentation: "Show, Don't Tell: How to Turn a Ho-Hum Memoir into a Humdinger"
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Susan J. Tweit (Salida, CO)'s memoir, Walking Nature Home, has been called "lovely, brave, inspiring" and "a must read." She's the author of eleven other books that draw on her life experiences in one way or another, along with hundreds of articles and essays for magazines and newspapers ranging from Fine Gardening and Popular Mechanics to Audubon and the Los Angeles Times. Visit her web site to sample her books and see where she's teaching and speaking; read her blog to see the insights she finds in everyday life.
Presentation: "Difficult Memories: Finding Voice and Grace in the 'Hard Stuff'";
Panelist: "Getting Published"
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Brit Williams (Austin, TX) is a Writer/Educator with a B.A. in English from the University of Texas, a State Board Teaching Certification in Secondary Level English and a contagious passion for writing. A member of the Writer's League of Texas, Story Circle Network and Chickenscratchers Free Range Circle, she is a daily student and practitioner of the written word. Her work has been published in various non-profit newsletters and Story Circle Network's Journal and True Words Anthology. Brit is a freelance non-profit grant writer, editor and educator and is currently working on a novel. She lives in Austin with her husband.
Presentation: "Mining First Experiences: Writing Techniques for Reviving Memories"
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Linda Wisniewski (Doylestown, PA) writes and teaches memoir workshops in Bucks County, PA. Her writing has been published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Christian Science Monitor, and several print and online literary journals and magazines. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Linda's memoir Off Kilter was published in 2008 by Pearlsong Press. Visit her website.
Presentation: "Writing Our Cultural Traditions";
Panelist: "Getting Published"
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Aditi Worcester (Austin, TX) is a Video Biographer and owner of "Save Their Story" (Austin). She traded in her job as producer of a travel-and-food show for a TV news channel to do something more meaningful and creative in the community. Today she helps families preserve the stories and memories of the important people in their lives by interviewing them on video, creating a valuable legacy for future generations. Visit her website.
Presentation: "Getting the 'Picture' on Our Lives"
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Kendra Bonnett (Milbridge, ME) is one half of the 
Matilda Butler (Gilroy, CA), the other half of 
Becca Taylor (Pinehurst, TX)