This Saturday, May 28th, the D6 monthly meeting will be on Zoom only, beginning at 1:30 PM (CST). 

Our guest speakers, Glendyn Buckley and Barbara Waterman-Peters, will share with us their journey of writing and illustrating children's books. They are both KACD1 members who will join us virtually from Topeka.
Glennie is the author of Ting & The Canterbury Tales. It's her third collaboration with Barbara Waterman-Peters. Two prior books are The Fish’s Wishes (in its third printing), 2015; and Bird in 2017. 

Barbara has illustrated several books, including BACI: A Mind-Altering Cat, and THE COLLECTIVE @25, both of which she also wrote and designed; in addition, she has created book cover art and illustrations for several authors and anthologies, and illustrated a coloring book for the Kansas Dental Association. She collaborated with poet Dennis Etzel, Jr. on his project and book, Two Ponders: A Collaboration. Together with Glendyn Buckley, she formed Pen & Brush Press after the success of their first children’s book, The Fish’s Wish’s (KNEA Recommended Reading List.) Their second book, Bird, won the Kansas Authors Club Children’s Book Award in 2019. Ting & the Canterbury Tales is their third book and is inspired by actual cats who’ve owned the authors.

If you're a current KAC D6 member, you're also invited to join us an hour earlier for a D6 Board Meeting on Zoom. (We'll use the same Zoom link for both meetings.) As we've done previously, well end the board meeting no later than 1:15 p.m. in order to give us time to take a break and to prepare for our guest speakers.

The Board is always talking about our future, and we have some neat plans, so join us again with your ideas. 
If you haven't heard, at the end of this year, Jim & Alex Potter will not be running for reelection as members of the D6 Board. Alex & I are pleased to have dedicated our service to improving D6 the last 2 1/2 years, and we look forward to stepping back and giving others an opportunity to make a difference.

By announcing our intention now, this will give D6 members an opportunity to consider becoming a Board candidate prior to our election on November 26, 2022.
If you have any questions about the duties of our Board members, I encourage you to contact one of us and show up at D6 Board meetings. 

D5 membrs Robert L. Dean, Jr., Roy Beckemeyer, and Skyler Lovelace have ekphrastic poems in the latest edition of MacQueens Quinterly. Dean has an ekphrastic poem to a painting by Edward Hopper, to which a link is given below. His craft essay on ekphrastic writing can be found in the table of contents. You can view the painting for each by clicking the link below the poem. Enjoy the work of these talented KAC members by clicking on the links below.
 
“Home Is the Sailor” by Dean            
“Finding the Door: One Writer’s Approach to Ekphrasis”
​         craft essay by Dean   
“Piatt Street, 1965” by Dean and Lovelace.  
“Insurrection” by Beckemeyer          
“Letters From Vincent” by Beckemeyer  ​

Save the Date!

For our next statewide Author Talk we will be hosting Lisa D. Stewart, the winner of the 2021 "It Looks Like a Million" Book Design Award. 

Tuesday, June 14, 2022
7:00 pm via Zoom

You must register in advance to attend this meeting. The Zoom link will be sent upon registration. We will send you a reminder link closer to the day. 

D5 member Robert L. Dean, Jr., is one of the readers scheduled for the annual Crystal Field Scholarship Reading at The Writers Place in Kansas City, MO, on Friday, May 20th, at 7 PM. More details in the link below. This is an in-person event, and proof of vaccination is required. All donations collected from the reading will go to the Crystal Field Scholarship to support a creative writing student at UMKC. You do not have to attend to donate. Dean participated last year when it was a Zoom event. Please consider donating even if you can't go. ​

Today we have the honor of welcoming Clyde Toland of Iola to the Kansas Authors Club. He'll be a part of District 3. 

In 1995, working with the Allen County Historical Society, Clyde Toland helped raise funds to move Maj. Gen. Frederick Funston's childhood home into Iola. That's when he got the idea of writing a book about Funston. 

Toland has now published the first of three volumes of a biography of Iola's favorite son, "American Hero, Kansas Heritage: Frederick Funston's Early Years 1865-1890." 
The other two volumes will be published later this year. 

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Barbara Waterman-Peters, Anne Spry and Thea Rademacher will combine their experience and tips for creating successful book launches at the May 21 meeting of District 1 of Kansas Authors Club. The Topeka publishers operate Pen & Brush Press LLC, Personal Chapters LLC and Flint Hills Publishing.

While admitting that information on book launches could fill up at least a one-day conference, the three women hope to give an overview of things that worked well on their personal or client launches. Thea will discuss how to invite the world to your book launch on Zoom and she will introduce CraveBooks.com, a new website that will help authors connect with readers and find and organize marketing campaigns.

Barbara will discuss the nuts and bolts of launch planning, including picking a venue that is appropriate for your target demographic.

Spry will focus on ways to partner with local organizations and venues, doing effective news releases, soliciting TV and radio interviews (also podcasts) and even compiling simple movie trailers.

​The meeting will begin at 12:30 p.m. at the Shawnee County Public Library, in the Langston Hughes Room, and will also be held on Zoom. This is a half-hour earlier than the group’s normal start time. To join the zoom meeting, send an email request to Anne Spry.
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Roundtable Bookstore in NOTO, Topeka, will be the setting for District 1's first in-person open mic, Words in the Wind, on Wednesday, May 18. Sign-in will start at 6:00 p.m. for poets who would like to share their work. The June Words in the Wind will be a prose session emceed by Kay Dugganator, a well-known local performance writer and story slam winner.
Roundtable will have their signature coffee and sweets available and participants will want to be sure to browse their books racks, especially the local author section.

Presenter, Amber Fraley, will introduce authors to Medium.com, a writing platform for emerging and established authors. She will also answer questions about her book, The Bug Diary. 

The newest issue of The Write Bridge, by Anamcara Press, includes the work of many Kansas Authors Club Members: Amber Fraley (D2), Peg Nichols (D2), David Hann (D2), Kathleen Kaska (D2), Boyd Bauman (D2), John L. Swainston (D2), Lindsey Bartlett (D2), Beth Gulley (D2), Debra Irsik (D2), Fred Applehanz (D1), Brenda L. White (D2), Brian Daldorph (D2), Iris Craver (D2), Ronda Miller (D2), Perry Shepard (D2), Micki Carroll (D2)

D3/D4 is inviting KAC members to attend Open Mic! It takes place Tuesday, May 10, at 7:00pm via Zoom. Our featured reader is new D4 member, Holly Friesen. We look forward to this opportunity to get to know Holly and her writing.
 
How does Open Mic work?
7:00-7:10pm – we check in, sign up to read, greet each other and celebrate victories
7:10-7:30pm – our Featured Reader presents
7:30-7:55 – Readers share in order of sign-up. Plan on 3 minutes. If there is plenty of time, attendees will get a 2nd opportunity to read.
 
H. C. Friesen: K-State Graduate, author, illustrator, watercolorist, and teacher of the Joy of Drawing Classes is excited to announce her self-published books are now ready for reading!
 
Holly Catherine Friesen grew up surrounded by Kansas relatives who were musicians, artists, authors, and storytellers, so naturally, she loved to sing, draw and write. Ms. Holly earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Graphic Design and later Elementary Education from Kansas State University. She is a trained puppeteer, singer/songwriter, and watercolorist, and loves to draw especially with watercolor pencils. She saw the need for children to see the beauty of the natural world around them: the light, colors, shapes, and lines, and then be inspired to create what they saw.  She created lessons for her class she calls “The Joy of Drawing from Real Life and Pictures”. Since 1994, she has been teaching children and adults to draw, paint, use pastel, and make original cards.  She has always wanted to be an illustrator and children’s book writer, and to publish her poems and stories. 

This year, her dreams are coming true. Her first self-published children’s book, with over 100 illustrations, along with students’ artwork from her Joy of Drawing Classes, Janey Olsen, Famous Artist of the Beach, has sold close to 100 copies in the first month. It showcases her method for teaching drawing in the location of the Atlantic Ocean on the Outer Banks of North Carolina through the eyes of 10-year-old Janey, who wants to hang her pictures in the family's booth at the area art show and become famous. 

To see more of Ms. Holly’s watercolor cards, prints, and children’s books, view her website, HCFriesen.com. She has three grown daughters, five lively grandchildren and lives in the “Art House” in Kansas with her Russian Blue cat named Prussia. A few of her many writing awards:  At age sixteen, her poem, “The Looking Glass,” about a cat who sees “The Other” in the mirror, was published in the Young Kansas Writers. Her short biography called Lestle Wilber Newcomer, the Kansas Man, won the Jesse Perry Stratford Award for Excellence in Historical Writing, presented by the Butler County Historical Society (1988).
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For this short author's talk, Holly will talk about the inspiration for the characters in story, Janey Olsen Famous Artist of the Beach, the process of putting the self-published story together, read a few parts of the story, as well as show a few of the watercolor pencil drawings she and her students have done for the book. 

​If you have news of writing events that would be of interest to all Kansas Authors Club members, or if you are a member (dues current) who would like to announce an achievement, please submit your news via this form.

D5 member Robert L. Dean, Jr., is one of the featured readers at SpoFest Poetry and Prose on Tuesday, May 3, 2022, beginning at 6PM Central, on Zoom; the link to register is given below. The other features are Audrey Friedman and Keith Kopka, with special guest author JL Mathews. Dean will be reading mostly from the manuscript for his forthcoming chapbook "Pulp," with Finishing Line Press. There is also an open mic during the event, so be sure to have something of your own handy to read in that segment. SpoFest is produced by James Bryant out of Sedalia, MO. The link to the Face Book event page, where you can register for the Zoom link, is here: