Current News from the Kansas Authors Club

#ReadLocalKS: They Met at Wounded Knee by Gretchen Eick

2/3/2025

Between Meadowlark Press and my work with Kansas Authors Club, I read a lot of work by Kansans and spend surprisingly little time reviewing books. There are only so many hats one can wear. I wanted to take a moment to mention They Met at Wounded Knee by Gretchen Eick. This was the Coffin Memorial Book Award winner in 2021 by KAC. It is an amazing book. It certainly fills in the oh-too-many gaps from history classes. It's a book that informs and enrages. A healthy dose of rage is needed, I think, to make us better pay attention and make the much-needed connections between past and present. As well, it is an incredible dual biography, bringing a perspective on native and Euro Americans that I had not experienced before. Eick's ability to explain the setting and time (historically, culturally) while illustrating the details of the Eastman's lives is commendable. Her writing helped me fit so many pieces together. I recommend this book.

--Tracy Million Simmons (Emporia)
This is a "reprint" from a FB post Tracy made in 2021

What are you reading? Help us lift and share the good news about Kansas literature. Tag your book loves and reviews on social media with #ReadLocalKS and submit here to be posted on the Kansas Authors Club website.

2024 Service Award: Sandra Lou Taylor

11/10/2024

At the Annual Meeting of the General Membership, held via Zoom on October 19, 2024, a Service Award was presented to Sandra Lou Taylor.

Awards are presented to members for achievement in writing (A), service to the club (S), and special award for particular accomplishment (SP).

Nomination #1:
I nominate Sandee Taylor, District 5, for a Service to KAC Award. The reasons I feel she is worthy of this award are:
Sandee has given 300% to KAC and D5 since 2019, when D5 hosted the convention in Wichita.

During the COVID challenge, she worked hard to keep connections between D5 members alive, assisting with computer access to zoom meetings.

For two years she has served as D5 president, initiating new activities like small D5 retreats, and contacting and encouraging people into active roles in the group with gentle encouragement.

She started and hosts at least two critique groups every month.

She has represented D5 and the state Kansas Authors Club by hosting tables at writing events to promote our organization to others. She manned a table at the 2023 Wichita Local Authors event at the Wichita Public Library and at the first ever Local Authors Day at the Winfield Public Library.

Sandee is always ready to encourage other writers, and to promote KAC, and I think she deserves a service award.

Nominated by Ann Fell

Nomination #2
Sandee Taylor has led D5 with energy, ideas, people skills, and innovation. She restored this district post-Covid with recruiting new leaders to the executive committee, bringing younger people into leadership, organizing district writing retreats, generating and facilitating writers critique groups, and keeping the former leaders involved in new capacities while shifting them to playing new roles. This was gracefully handled and resulted in freeing up the top leadership positions for “new blood” while not alienating the old leaders who had been in place far longer than the by-laws called for. She found new roles for the former leaders and remained positive and helpful during what could have been a conflictual change. Sandee is utterly committed to KAC’s growth and to servicing members. Without her as president we would have faded to a group of cronies only. With her D5 is vibrant and growing and several writers groups are nurturing the writing skills of members in exciting, collaborative ways.

Nominated by Gretchen Eick

"Since 2019, I have explored more and more leadership roles in D5 and KAC. Yesterday, I was honored for my service to KAC. I want to thank my writing friends for being a part of my life and encouraging my writing journey. The authors in KAC bless me each month and at the annual conventions/retreats. Together, I look forward to what we as KAC members will be able to accomplish in 2025." ~ Sandee Taylor 10/20/2024

#ReadLocalKS - The Set Up: 1984

11/8/2024

The Set Up: 1984: Britain’s Biggest Drug Bust,
Gretchen Eick, Blue Cedar Press, 2020.

Brian Daldorph review

It’s hard to fault the ambition of Eick’s novel, telling this story of “Britain’s Biggest Drug Bust” that brings into play not only the dangerous maze of Middle Eastern politics, but also the foreign policies of the U.S., U.K. and Israel, involving the CIA, the British secret service (MI5), arms dealers, the list goes on and on. Eick deftly weaves all these threads together.

The basic plot, taken from actual events occurring in the mid-1980s, focuses on the crew of the yacht The Robert Gordon, sailing on a precarious mission off the coast of Lebanon to pick up a huge load of cannabis resin likely grown in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, and ferrying it back through the Mediterranean to the UK where it was delivered to drug runners. Turned out it was all a set-up: police and Customs officers were ready to spring their trap.

Eick focuses on the five-member crew of the yacht, led by Keith Brown, the owner of a car-hire business, keen to make a bunch of money by bringing drugs into the UK. He assembles a crew of naifs and sails off to make the pick-up. At every point in the novel, you get the sense that this crew is way out of its depth in these waters, never more so than when they make the pick up off the coast of Lebanon from a group of black-masked, armed men, who just might be a Palestinian faction operating in Lebanon. They don’t really know. From the title of the book, and from plenty of suggestions throughout, we soon get the sense that the crew have been set up by the powers-that-be, pawns in a game that they have small chance of understanding.

The book’s a treasury of inside information about the tangled politics of the time, in particular, the CIA plot, led by William Casey, director of the CIA in the Reagan Administration, to illicitly fund the Nicaraguan Contras fighting a bloody civil war against the left-wing Sandanista government. Eick’s research is impressive (sources listed in the back of the novel) as is her confidence in keeping track of all the tentacles of the beast. The historical context of the novel gives everything a kind of gravity and depth that adds to the import of each scene.

Though Eick’s very good at painting the big picture, she’s best at showing us the plight of the smaller players in this global drama, the crew of the Robert Gordon yacht carrying tons of cannabis into the UK. They don’t understand the politics of it all: they’re all in it for a bit of adventure and a chance to make quick money. Two of the five crew don’t even know about the cargo, yet they still have to face imprisonment, trial and their lives irreparably damaged even after release.

The novel ends with (Eick assures us) an actual exchange between crew member David Bennie and arms dealer and billionaire Adnan Khashoggi (who just might be the mastermind behind all the events here), when Bennie is trying to get his life back together after the trial. Bennie has been working on a yacht in Monaco but has faced police harassment because of his connection with the Robert Gordon case. He realizes that he won’t be able to work on yachts anymore, because of police harassment.

Khashoggi’s limo approaches him on the dock and the man himself speaks to Bennie, sympathizing with him for his trouble. David’s response emphasizes the way that he was just one of the little fish caught in the net of the whole affair: “My mates were just ordinary dudes, not enough smarts altogether to organize a major drug heist.” Khashoggi tells him that he won’t be having any problems in the future, and you get the sense that with all the cards that Khashoggi holds as an international arms dealer, he’ll be good for his word.

Eick’s so good at holding together the central narrative of this story while locations change quickly and characters come and go. We’re taken on a wild ride through the Mediterranean, to Brixton prison, to Cyprus, to Rhodes, to a ranch in Costa Rica used as a staging ground for shipping arms to Nicaragua.

I always got the sense that I was in good hands, that the novelist would bring us, a little breathless, to that last scene in Monaco with Khashoggi saying so much without saying much at all.

Purchase @ Blue Cedar Press

Blue Cedar Press, Wichita, KS, announces its books in print by June 2024

2/3/2024

Order from IngramSpark or bluecedarpress.com

February 1 Reginald D Jarrell, Finding Myron: an adopted son’s search for his birth father
A Black man adopted by extended family and raised in a loving home is haunted by questions about the birth father that no one will tell him about. A haunting memoir about the power of DNA connection and the persistent need to know your roots.

Jarrell’s story will be helpful for adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents, as well as youth groups and classes in congregations and social studies classes.

Retail Price: $20.00
ISBNs: 978-1-958728-16-1 (paper) & 978-1-958728-17-8 (ebook)
LCCN: 2023949737

March 1 G. C. Eick, Where is Ana Amara? [an international thriller]
When a Syrian journalist disappears from the London home she shares with her British partner while investigating the treatment of asylum seekers by Britain’s Ultra Party, her partner seeks help from four renegade Members of Parliament and the community of Syrian immigrants. Their search for Ana leads them to an international adoption network, Britain’s retired chemical weapons facility, and a runaway Saudi princess and provokes an international scandal.

Retail price: $20.00
ISBNs: 978-1-958728-18-5 (paper) & 978-1-958728-19-2 (ebook)
LCCN: 2024930300

March 15 Aida Dziho-Sator, For Me, the War Begins in an Elevator (poems)
Aida Dziho-Sator was a child when the Bosnian War began in 1992. She has since become an internationally traveled professor of English Literature who somehow manages to also write exquisite poetry while teaching, applying for travel grants, and raising two children. Her poems are about relationships, memory, being a woman, and internal and external wars. They are truthful, powerful, and even funny.

Retail Price: $15.00
ISBNs: 978-1-958728-21-5 (paper) & 978-1-958728-20-8 (ebook)
LCCN: 2024930887

April 30 The Death Project: An Anthology for the Living
36 authors from different ethnicities and religions reflect in prose and poetry on losing loved ones and finding a way forward. Includes information on how different religions handle death and how people have coped with deaths from war, from police violence, suicide, murder, AIDS, dementia, illness.

Perspectives include a mortician, a New Age spiritualist, a police officer, and women and men from around the world. New edition with added material. A book for congregations, funeral homes, and all those living with loss. Profits from will go to international health care workers.

Retail price: $15.99
ISBNs 978-1-958728-22-2 (paper) & 978-1-958728-23-9 (ebook)
LCCN: forthcoming

June 1 Paul Lamb, Parent Imperfect (a novel)
Pressed by Kelly, newly married Curt and Kelly agree to adopt a child. But Kelly struggles with depression and memories of his family’s abusive rejection of him because he is gay and Curt is uncertain if he can love their unusual son. With the help of Curt’s parents, they work at it, sustained by the cabin in the Ozarks that has for generations been a lodestone for all of the men in Curt’s family. Can they be a family? Can the cabin’s magic include two outsiders, Kelly and their son Clarkson? A moving story of loving and making family in the Twenty-First Century. The sequel to One-Match Fire (2022).

Retail price: $19.99
ISBNs 978-1-958728-24-6 (paper) & 978-1-958728-23-9 (ebook)
LCCN: forthcoming

June 15 The Love Book: Collected Shorts on Love
Selected poetry, short stories, and memoirs about different kinds of love and loving for your favorite persons. These pieces were selected by judges from a contest held by Blue Cedar Press in 2024.

Retail Price: $20.00
ISBNs: 978-1-958728-26-0 (paper) & 978-1-958728-27-7 (ebook)
LCCN: forthcoming

Member News: Gretchen Eick, D5

9/6/2023

Sept. 16, 2023 Wichita's Chester I Lewis Park will be dedicated. It honors the Black lawyer who was nationally known for his work to bring full enforcement of the 14th Amendment to Kansas and the nation.

Gretchen Eick wrote the information accessed via QR codes on each of the beautiful tall glass panels painted with images of Lewis' work for access to equal public accommodations, housing, swimming pools, education, and employment. The paintings on glass are the work of artist Ellamonique Bauccus. Visit the park with her work and Gretchen's background information when you are in Wichita and bring the whole family. Lewis was a great and courageous man about whom all Kansans should know.

Chester I. Lewis Reflection Square Park

Writers in Community: Gretchen Eick

6/10/2023

Gretchen Eick was one of the writers featured at the Wichita Library's writers reading their work event June 3. She read her 6 minute play, "Siblings," which placed second in last year's playwriting contest, a play for congregations or clubs or groups to use to start discussion of the problem of alienation between family or friends due to differences.

Writers in the Community is a Kansas Authors Club program that highlights member educational and outreach efforts in our communities.

Click Here to Learn More and Submit Your Own News

Writers in Community: Gretchen Eick

5/4/2023

a note from D5 member, Gretchen Eick:

In March I worked with ArtsPartners Wichita to help five authors develop books for 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders that would help reluctant readers enter the story and keep reading. Each book was related to one or more of the indicators of a healthy community. The authors were exceptional and the process quite a delight. Now their books are being worked on by local artists who are doing the illustrations in collaboration with the authors. What a delight it was to do this work of writing in the community!

D5 Authors Read at Book Launch

11/28/2022

Featuring Dr. Reginald Jarrett and Dr. Gretchen Eick

The Peace Committee will host a book launch on Thursday, December 1, featuring two 2022 books by local authors that center on race.

Thursday at 7 p.m. at 655 S. Lorraine, at the Lorraine Avenue Mennonite Church in the sanctuary.

Dr. Reginald Jarrett's book 31 Days [Nights]: Memoir of Living Black in America is a series of short essays about his life here in Wichita and across the U.S. A truth-telling book of interpersonal encounters among various ethnicities of Americans told by a gifted communicator, 31 Days will surprise readers and enlarge their understanding of how race functions in America. Jarrell is a professor at Southwestern University and a lawyer, pastor, and TV journalist who has lived across the U.S. but grew up in Wichita. This is his second book.

Dr. Gretchen Eick's newest novel, Dark Crossings, takes place in 2019. An interracial family with two teens living in Evanston, IL, north of Chicago is devastated when a family member is murdered. The difficult journey through the survivors' grief nearly breaks them. The discovery through a DNA test of unknown family members connected to the Philadelphia police murder of 12 Black people on May 13, 1985, helps them reconstruct their lives. Eick is a professor of history emerita and teaches at WSU's Lifelong Learning program. This is her eighth book. The authors will read excerpts and discuss their books and what each adds to our knowledge of the role of "race" in today's U.S.

2022 Convention: Gretchen Eick Service Award

11/19/2022

Gretchen Eick
Merit Award for Service to the Club
October 22, 2022

Nominated by Tracy Million Simmons, D2 (Emporia)

Gretchen Eick is an accomplished author, publisher, and educator. She joined our organization in 2016.

Gretchen has served District 5 as vice president and program manager. If you are curious, take a look at the terrific lineup of 2022 speakers on the D5 portion of our website.

Gretchen service on the Committee to Restructure Kansas Authors Club, taking time out of a busy writing schedule to learn more about our organization. Gretchen's questions often brought about immediate improvement. Our website features several enhancements and/or clarifications that came about via discussions with Gretchen.

I nominate Gretchen Eick for a merit award in service to Kansas Authors Club.

-Tracy Million Simmons, D2 Member (Emporia)

2022 Convention: Gretchen Eick Service Award

11/12/2022

Gretchen Eick
Merit Award for Service to the Club
October 22, 2022

Nominated by Tracy Million Simmons

Gretchen Eick is an accomplished author, publisher, and educator. She joined our organization in 2016.

Gretchen has served District 5 as vice president and program manager. If you are curious, take a look at the terrific line-up of speakers in 2022 on the D5 portion of the website. Gretchen served on the committee to restructure Kansas Authors Club, taking time out of a busy writing schedule to learn more about our organization and examine our processes and procedures. Gretchen's questions alone often brought about immediate improvements. Our website features several enhancements and/or clarifications that came about via discussions with Gretchen.

I nominate Gretchen Eick for a merit award in service to the Kansas Authors Club.

-Tracy Million Simmons, D2 member (Emporia)

News from Blue Cedar Press

10/6/2022

Wichita's indie press, Blue Cedar Press, has published 5 books in 2022, 4 by Kansas authors.
Order from bluecedarpress.com, B&N online, or your favorite bookstore.

31 Days (Nights): Memoir of Living Black in America by Reginald D. Jarrell (Jarrell’s work as a TV and print news reporter and columnist, a university assistant professor, an attorney, and a janitor—and his experiences living across the Midwest, in California, D.C., and Mississippi inform his short, memorable essays.)
ISBN: 978-1-7369112-7-3 (paper)
ISBN: 978-1-7369112-8-0 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930901

Dark Crossings, a novel by Gretchen Eick (Prose Writer of 2021 for the Kansas Authors Club, author of 2 histories and 5 novels)--2nd in her Crossings series
Richard and Keisha by 2019 are parents of two teens, professors living happily together until everything changes with an act of random violence, plunging their family into disfunction and despair. Extended family may not be enough to pull them through their grief. But DNA discovery of another branch of the family tree may at least distract them and lead them into the darkness of Philadelphia's attack on the MOVE community and another family murder. Aug. '22
ISBN: 978-1-958728-01-7 (paper) $20
ISBN: 978-1-958728-00-0 (ebook) $6.99
Library of Congress LCCN: 2022940932

Maybe Crossings, a novel by Gretchen Eick (Prose Writer of 2021 for the Kansas Authors Club, author of 2 histories and 5 novels)--1st in her Crossings series--2nd edition with a study guide
Black and white young people meet in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964 to register voters and form the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party forging relationships that resume in 2003 through a series of coincidences that bring them and their children together. A novel about families lost and found, social change fought for and glimpsed, and generational differences that test understandings of commitment. Sept. '22
ISBN: 9781958728024 (paper) $18
ISBN: 978-1-958728-05-5 (epub) $5.99
LCCN: 2022945367

One-Match Fire, a novel by Paul Lamb (Paul Lamb's stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including The Adroit Journal, Aethlon, Foliate Oak, MOON Magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs, Magnolia Review (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Little Patuxent Review, Platte Valley Review, and others.) For David the cabin evoked memories of his father. For his son it was family and sanctuary. All that was wrong was fixable when they were at the cabin. But would this weekend change everything? A story of fathers and sons and the work of loving despite profound differences.) Oct. '22
ISBN: 978-1-958728-04-8 (paper) $20
ISBN: 978-1-958728-03-1 (ebook) $6.99
LCCN: 2022945368

Why Does She Always Talk About Her Husband? poems by David Romanda (David Romanda is the author of I’m Sick of Pale Blue Skies, a limited-edition chapbook, and the broken bird feeder, a full collection. His work has been included in Best Canadian Poetry and published in 27 journals. Romanda lives in Kawasaki City, Japan.) This is minimalist poetry at its finest—quick, punchy, and deceptively spare. These are offbeat rebel-playful poems that beg to be read aloud and shared with others.) Coming Nov. '22
ISBN: 978-1-958728-06-2 (paper) $10
ISBN: 978-1-958728-07-9 (ebook) $4.99
LCCN: 2022947139

2022 Convention Presenter: Gretchen Eick

9/30/2022

Countering Censorship by Writing

Recently we’ve seen a movement to suppress what books schools and libraries readers can read. Books have been burned in Tennessee and a PEN study documented 1,145 unique book titles banned in 86 school districts in 26 states between July 2021 and April 2022. Kansas is among the states where such book bans have been imposed by school districts. There have been 713 instances of censorship in Texas, 456 bans in Pennsylvania, and 204 in Florida.

As writers, how do we respond to these violations of our First Amendment rights?

Gretchen Eick has taken up controversial issues in her two scholarly histories/biographies and five novels. She is committed to using the power of her pen (keyboard?) to fight this suppression. She encourages writers to do the same by including in their stories characters of diverse races, nationalities, religions, sexual identification, and classes, and in their historical fiction, by including what what was happening to people living with those different identities. How do you do that?

Gretchen Eick is a professor of history emerita who now teaches in Wichita State’s Lifelong Learning program. She taught 20 years at Friends University and in Latvia and Bosnia and Herzegovina thanks to Fulbright Fellowships.

Gretchen is scheduled to present at 10:15am-11:00am on Saturday, October 22.

PRESENTATION BLOCK 1 – EXPANDING VIEWS AND PERSPECTIVES

You are Invited to Attend: Author Talk, by Dr. Gretchen Eick

1/31/2022

Tuesday, February 8 at 7pm

Our next 2nd Tuesday Meeting, hosted by Districts 3 and 4 via Zoom, will be a talk by Dr. Gretchen Eick, winner of the 2021 Coffin Memorial Book Award.

Register in advance to receive a link to this meeting.

Wedding Imagination and Passion with Historical Investigation

About the Author:
Dr. Gretchen Eick has been in love with the world since 1962 when she traveled to west Africa to attend Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone for six months. Since then she has traveled to or lived in over forty countries, which shapes her interests and her writing of history, biography, political commentary, and fiction. As a late blooming academic, starting a PhD in her 50s, she combined her international interests with a passion for the history of the US, which she taught at Friends University in Wichita for twenty years before retiring to have more time to write. With her husband, the poet Michael Poage, she runs Blue Cedar Press and edits and publishes “new voices from the prairie and the planet.” Her experience working on Capitol Hill for fourteen years and researching, writing, and teaching history provide grist for her prodigious curiosity. She has written seven books, two of them prize-winners, and all but one written in the past eight years.

Eick’s published books include:
They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story (University of Nevada Press, 2020)
The Set Up, 1984: Classified until 2064 (Blue Cedar Press, 2020)
The Death Project: An Anthology for These Times (Blue Cedar Press, 2020)
The Hard Verge, Britain 2025 (Amazon, 2019)
African Americans of Wichita (Arcadia, 2017)
Finding Duncan (Blue Cedar Press, 2015)
Maybe Crossings (Blue Cedar Press, 2015)
Herstories: Woman to Woman (Blue Cedar Press, 2014)
Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-72 (University of Illinois Press, 2001/2007)

View the Coffin Award Winners

#ReadLocalKS: They Met at Wounded Knee by Gretchen Eick

2024 Service Award: Sandra Lou Taylor

#ReadLocalKS - The Set Up: 1984

Blue Cedar Press, Wichita, KS, announces its books in print by June 2024

Member News: Gretchen Eick, D5

Writers in Community: Gretchen Eick

Writers in Community: Gretchen Eick

D5 Authors Read at Book Launch

2022 Convention: Gretchen Eick Service Award

2022 Convention: Gretchen Eick Service Award

News from Blue Cedar Press

2022 Convention Presenter: Gretchen Eick

Countering Censorship by Writing

You are Invited to Attend: Author Talk, by Dr. Gretchen Eick

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