You are Invited!

Join us in Lawrence October 21-23, 2022 for "The Write Way to the Future!" convention.

Schedule and registration details are now available!

 We will be posting more details about our workshops and presenters throughout the coming month. We look forward to hosting you at the convention in October. Tickets for live streaming and viewing recorded sessions later from home are also available.

Don't forget to check out the books of our convention supporters. Click on the image below to learn more. This is an ideal time to get a quarter page advertisement for your books, too! Details here.

D6 member, Janet Kelley, will be at Crow & Co. bookstore in Hutchinson, KS on Tuesday, July 5th at 5 pm, to share her book, TAINT. It's a novel set in Kansas and dealing with sexual assault. Come hear about the genesis of the story and Janet's writing process. Proceeds from the book are donated to The Trevor Project, a nonprofit that works with LGBTQ teens in crisis.

Lisa was the winner of our 2021 "It Looks Like a Million" Book Design Award.

2021 Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award for books published by Kansas City area writers

2021 High Plains Book Award Finalist

At 54, Lisa Stewart set out to regain the fearless girl she once had been, riding her horse, Chief, 500 miles home. Hot, homeless, and horseback, she snapped back into every original cell. On an extraordinary homegoing from Kansas City to Bates and Vernon Counties in Missouri, Lisa exhausted herself, faced her past, trusted strangers, and stayed in the middle of her frightened horse to document modern rural America, the people, animals, and land. 

Praise:
“Lisa Stewart’s The Big Quiet charts a path for all women. It’s a path at once dangerous and thrilling and a path she had started down and backed out of since childhood. The resulting narrative recounts a journey not only to a point on the map but to a whole and liberated self. Stewart is finally free to trust herself and others, to survive by her wits and with the help of kind strangers of which there are still many. This is a delicious fantasy of a journey most of us deny ourselves and one taken on the back of a horse whose simultaneously terrified and fiercely loyal personality unfurls before us as the richest of characters’ personalities do—on the way from Point A to Point B.”
—Kelly Barth, author of My Almost Certainly Real Imaginary Jesus
“This is a book of gratitude of the highest order. Stewart, a 54-year-old woman riding alone on a high-strung, sure-footed horse across the gravel grid of rural America, is grateful each night for a place to pitch a tent and pasture her horse. But her journey, past and present, is as much about the people she meets, many of whom know how to study a horse and to trust its rider—these strangers are glad to offer water and their own stories, which, like Stewarts’, churn with old wounds, hard work, family, and an abiding trust in open land. This compelling meditation reminds us that every step, fall, and missed road leads the rider home.”

—Gary Dop, author of Father, Child, Water, MFA Program Director at Randolph College
“This book is more than a log of an unusual (for this day and age) solitary horseback journey; it is also a perceptive examination of the author’s own life—a well-written introspective journey of self-discovery.”

—James F. Hoy, author of Flint Hills Cowboys: Tales of the Tallgrass Prairie, Chair of Emporia State University’s English Department and professor, past president of the Kansas Historical Society
“After riding more than 3,000 miles across the United States in the early 1980s, Stewart helped launch one of that country’s most successful saddle companies. Yet Lisa Stewart is no salesman, eager to sell a saddle to gain a commission. She is a long rider who made mistakes and learned by them. She faced obstacles and overcame them. She was presented with ancient riddles and discovered solutions.”

—CuChullaine O’Reilly, FRGS, Founding Member of The Long Riders’ Guild
A unique and inherently fascinating memoir, "The Big Quiet: One Woman's Horseback Ride Home" will prove to be an immediately welcome and enduringly popular addition to both community and college/university library Contemporary American Biography collections. It should be noted for the personal reading lists of all dedicated horse lovers and dedicated travelogue fans that "The Big Quiet: One Woman's Horseback Ride Home" is also readily available in a digital book format (Kindle, $9.99).

—Helen Dumont, Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

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. 

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. 

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. 

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).
​
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. 

Leonard Krishtalka will share his experience writing historical murder mysteries. His latest,  The Body on the Bed, about a murder in Lawrence, Kansas, has been described as:

“One of the Best Crime, Mystery and Thriller Books.” 
—Mystery Tribune, September 2021

Leonard Krishtalka is the author of award-winning essays, the acclaimed book, Dinosaur Plots, and The Harry Przewalski Series. As a paleontologist, he has worked throughout the fossil-rich badlands of the American
west, Canada, Patagonia, China, Ethiopia, and Kenya. The Body on the Bed is his 5th book.

Whether you are new to ekphrasis or an old hand at it, the practice can offer both a concrete anchor to start a piece as well as a sail to push your writing in a new direction. Janice Northerns will read several ekphrastic poems from her award-winning collection Some Electric Hum and share tips to help you take ekphrastic writing to the next level. The discussion will be geared toward prose writers as well as poets.

​Optional: Those who plan to attend are invited to write ahead of time a poem or flash prose piece responding to the painting “Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed” by Vincent Van Gogh (1887). You can view the painting at this museum link:
https://krollermuller.nl/en/vincent-van-gogh-four-sunflowers-gone-to-seed-1

Janice Northerns, of Liberal, is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the 2021 KAC Nelson Poetry Book Award, the KU Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University, where she received the Robert S. Newton Award for Creative Writing. Her work has been widely published in literary journals. Honors include a Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts residency, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship, and numerous awards for individual poems. Janice and her husband moved to Liberal in 1998, where she taught English at Seward County Community College before retiring in 2019 to write full-time. The landscapes and people of West Texas and southwest Kansas are a steady source of inspiration for her poetry.
 
 
 
Book Description:
 “Some Electric Hum reads … like a treatise on the ways communities are crafted by wanting, having, and then letting go. … This book exemplifies her skill in giving language to those fragile and ephemeral experiences of connection, as well as her determination to understand how connection might be felt in the barely perceptible hum of a completed circuit, closed but still alive with alternating electric currents.”
— Dr. Sandra Cox, judge for the Nelson Poetry Book Award