Interview with Anna Geare

Anna Geare is an 18-year-old recent graduate of Foothill Technology High School in Ventura, California. She has been writing poetry since the 7th grade and is also in love with the theatre -- she has written a one-act play and multiple scenes and monologues for her acting class, and is currently working on her second one-act play. In addition to theatre, she has an interest in science and engineering. At Foothill she was on the school robotics team and is planning to major in chemistry in college. She plans to become a chemical engineer while continuing to be involved in acting and writing.

Anna's poem "Through Open Eyes" is featured in Dancing With The Pen: a collection of today's best youth writing, available on Amazon here.


How did you get your idea for "Through Open Eyes"?

"Through Open Eyes" is a poem about the different problems that the world is facing and how so few people seem to really care or are passionate about helping. They include, among other things: Global Warming, child soldiers in Africa, terrorism, and poverty. I volunteer for a variety of different organizations and grew up with social worker parents. I’ve become real passionate about helping the world in as many ways as I can. This poem was a way for me to express my message and hopefully inspire others to help the world as well. My personal inspiration for the poem was the Black Eyed Peas' song “Where is the Love?” I wrote my poem with a rhyme scheme and beat that reminds me of rap and comes off as a little angry. I was inspired by the idea and just sat down and wrote a bunch of different couplets, each about a different problem, then rearranged them in a multitude of different ways until it just felt right.

Have you been writing for a long time? What do you like about writing?

I wrote some as a kid, but not much. When I truly took on writing as a hobby was in the 7th grade when we had a huge unit on poetry that I loved. I entered a local poetry contest that year with a poem I wrote entitled “The Color of Peace.” I went to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference the summer after 8th grade where I was inspired to pursue writing a bit more. My love of theatre then lead me to playwriting, which seemed to come fairly naturally to me. When I see a story, I naturally see it on the stage. Writing, especially poetry, gives me a way to express myself, but only when I write personally. Then there are times when I write from a view completely different from my own, about things I may have never even experienced. This type of writing attracts me the same way acting does. It gives me an opportunity to take on a character completely different from myself and explore emotions I don’t feel on a daily basis. This fascinates me.

What does it mean to you to have your piece included in this book?

When I think about being published in this book, I’m reminded of my first attendance to the Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference. I talked to an agent, simply for the experience, knowing very well I was not going to get far with the poems I had written at 13. The agent told me poetry was incredibly hard to get published, and others have also been discouraging. Well, here I am, with a poem published in a book! I was ecstatic when I was notified that my poem was chosen to win honorable mention and be published in Dancing With The Pen.

Do you have any advice for other writers, or for other young people going after their dreams?

Don’t give up and don’t put your true dreams aside for more “practical” ones. Especially with writing, it’s easy to put your more artsy or impractical dreams aside to concentrate on school or related interests. I didn’t always spend much time on writing, or even acting for that matter. Science was my more practical interest, so once I got into high school, that pursuit came first. I can tell you that I have never once regretted taking the time to attend a writers conference or write a play, but I do sometimes regret not putting time aside each week to work on my play or write a poem. Life is just going to get more and more busy as you get older. Take advantage of the time you have and follow any dreams you may have.

Can you share a few of your favorite books or authors?

I will give the “cliché” answer of J.K. Rowling and Tolkien. Growing up, those were definitely my favorites as well as Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become a pretty big Ray Bradbury fan. I’ve had the opportunity to hear him speak at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference a few times, which were priceless experiences. Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone has also been a very inspirational book for me. The autobiographical story of a child soldier from Africa is what inspired my senior project to build a school in Sierra Leone, which has lead to my desire to join the Peace Corps after I get my Bachelor's degree.

What inspires you?

Lots of things actually. I have an array of interests, so I find interesting things to write about from many different places. I’ve written about my family, about problems in the world that interest me, about my emotions, and about experiences I have never had. In fact, the original poem I won Honorable Mention for was not suitable for a book for young students, but was inspired by a random set of words pulled from a magazine. The play I’m currently writing was inspired by a lesson on WWI I learned in school. The world is full of inspiration, it just takes someone to recognize it and write it down.

What are you working on now? What’s next for you?

I haven’t been working on as much poetry lately, but I have been doing more stage writing. It can be pretty hard finding scenes and monologues for youth to perform, so I’ve been writing some stuff for my acting class. I just wrote a scene that everyone seemed to love. I’m also trying to work on my one-act play. It’s still in the planning stages, but I’m getting pretty close to being ready to write it out.

Links:

• Order Dancing With The Pen on Amazon. (It rose to a #2 ranking on Amazon.com in the "literature anthologies" category in its first week of release!
• Please take a few seconds to "like" our Amazon page!
• And, if you have a few minutes and could write a review on Amazon, that would be fantastic! 
• You can also follow Dancing With The Pen on Facebook and Twitter. We're now featured on Goodreads, too!
• Discounted bulk orders are available at the Write On! website: www.writeonbooks.org. 

Interview with Barbara Forte Abate

I'm delighted to have Barbara Forte Abate, author of the new novel The Secret of Lies, as my guest today! 

What would you like readers to know about you as an introduction?

I’m pretty certain that I’ve always wanted to be a writer. It seems the yearning was just always there swirling around in my head. I grew up in a small town in upstate New York, a middle child who spent an ordinate amount of time daydreaming. I aspired to great things in my mind, but was never so confident as to actually share my ambitions out loud, convinced that no one would believe an ordinary girl like me capable of accomplishing something as exceptional as writing books.

Although it would be years after graduating high school before I would actually sit down with my blank yellow pad, held to the chair by my determination to launch head-first into the still simmering dream to write, once I got started – that first sentence, paragraph, page – the love of creating stories was fully returned and off at a gallop.

The Secret of Lies is my first published novel, but it isn’t the first one I’ve written. That first book lives a quiet existence on a dark shelf in the closet. It’s not very good, but I hold onto it for what it represents – because those finished pages were so effective in pushing me past the barrier erected between the desire of wanting to write and actually doing it.

Tell us about The Secret of Lies. What was your inspiration/motivation behind this book?

It amazes me really, how clearly I recall the precise moment when the idea for this book came skidding into my mind – not because it was so extraordinary or profound, but because once it arrived, it stayed to become a twenty-year obsession. I’d just finished writing my first novel, and although it felt like a sing-from-the-mountain-tops-milestone-accomplishment, I recognized that it wasn’t the book I wanted to write. I was absolutely primed and ready for something bigger and so when this seed of an idea arrived – the thought of someone stepping out the door and simply walking away from their life for reasons yet unknown – it felt exciting and potentially very important.

Because I married young and had three of my four children at the time, life was forever busy and full to the point of overflowing. The only opportunity I had for attempting to write was when my two little girls were at school and the baby was taking her afternoon nap. This was to be my routine for years, writing on my yellow pads over the span of a bazillion afternoons – eternally thankful that baby Chelsea was a marathon napper!

When I started this story I didn’t so much have a plan as I had abundant passion. No fleshed out characters, plot, or destination -- it truly unfolded as I poured words onto the pages. And once I began to understand and fully care about my characters they returned the favor by telling me their story.


What have you learned through writing this book?

The most obvious answer would be that I learned what it takes to write a book – not any book, but one I’m proud of. Because I pretty much jumped directly into marriage and family only a few years after graduating high school, I wasn’t armed with an abundance of writing skills when I first sat down with the intention to write a book. I was intimidated enough by the reality of how little I knew about the writing process that I was careful not to look at that particular fact too close or for too long. I bought stacks of used books: grammar, writing technique, a dictionary that weighed as much as a cinder block, punctuation and sentence structure, The Elements of Style – pretty much everything I didn’t pay enough attention to while I was in school. Dig-in and forge ahead was my plan and I stuck with it – for twenty years. It truly was a learning process like no other, and by the time I realized exactly what I was up against and the reserves required for the journey, I was in far too deep to shut the door and walk away.

Not only did I learn that getting the words right would take years (there came a point when I simply had to stop counting rewrites and edits, as the numbers had climbed high enough to be nearly frightening), but then came the most emotionally brutal portion of the challenge – the years and years of rejections and insistent knocking on closed doors that no one intended to answer anytime soon.

It was around this time when I fully came to understand just how important writing was to me – the fact that I refused to give up when by every indication it was time to hang up my pen. Every returned manuscript landed like a punch in the stomach, but once I recovered it only made me dig in deeper. Only then, when I was pushing so determinedly to find a place for my novel in the world did I realize my own strength, and the determined faith I was wielding like a weapon and a shield at the same time.


I love that -- the idea that faith can be both a weapon and shield. Your words are inspirational to anyone following their dreams! Tell us, how did you get started writing?

I’ve always been crazy in love with books, and so writing my own felt like something just waiting to happen. I honestly can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing. I started composing stories in grade school and it wasn’t long until one of my classmates and I got the idea to compose an “underground” newspaper that consequently ended up getting us into a good deal of trouble when our teacher found copies stashed in our desks.

Even then, it was my little pink diary that contained my best fiction. I had an enormous fear that my sisters would find my hiding place at the back of our shared closet, so whenever I wrote anything I invented names, characters and a random scene or two in an effort to camouflage the passages of truth. Even now a bajillion years later, I employ that same technique when journaling, not because of snooping sisters, but more because I tend to journal only when I’m angry, disappointed, or disillusioned. Venting in written form has always been medicinal for me, but it’s generally very exposed and ugly to look back on once the moment has passed. By putting it all down in my peculiar code of fictitious names and lingo, it later reads back as mostly ridiculous and amusing, rather than the ramblings of a tyrant.


What is your writing process like?

I’ve always written my first drafts in longhand on big yellow legal pads. There’s something that feels so authentically creative about filling those stark blank pages with thoughts, words, and scribbles. We didn’t own a computer when I completed my first draft of The Secret of Lies, which looking back now I can’t even imagine, but once I’d finished I knew I couldn’t send it out to agents and publishers as it was – scribbled out on yellow pads – so I asked a friend to borrow her typewriter.

Coincidently, having the loaner typewriter parked on the kitchen table for the next several months was the not-so-difficult-to-decipher clue that tipped my husband and children to the fact that I’d been clandestinely penning a novel. I was so insecure over my abilities, and had been holding to the fear that everyone would consider my writing a self-absorbed and egotistical pursuit, that I only wrote in the afternoons while my children were napping. As it turned out, it was a very misplaced assumption on my part, because my family has been nothing other than supportive, encouraging, and glowingly proud of my writerly accomplishments.


How do you get ideas for what you write?

The most inspiring ideas seem to come from those things I find unfolding right around me – not necessarily up-close and personal, but within reach if I’m paying attention. If I merely pass the time loitering in the space my own life occupies, my writing can become stale, and really, the world at large is positively rich with ingredients to season any writers stew. Startling or unusual news stories have provided useable hints and clues for current and future stories. Overheard conversations passed between strangers can lend themselves to characters or scenes in development – most recently a young woman in the grocery store berating her “selfish and inconsiderate” boyfriend over her cell phone at the same time she calmly examined a box of Fruity Pebbles Cereal. I’ve also discovered more than a few striking characteristics for characters in development while flipping through a magazine and finding myself captivated by an intriguing photograph.

Even then, the ideas I find most durable over the course of writing a story are those that seem to come up from nowhere in particular. I can’t say I understand how it works really, and even after years of chasing my imagination I’m still unsure how it is that our thoughts can so consistently wander off into places we don’t always recognize or even know we possess, diving deep and returning time and again with the components essential for creating memorable stories.


What is your biggest advice for young people reaching for their dreams?

First and foremost you have to trust the internal plug-in that gave you the dream to begin with, and then you have to be willing to invest in yourself. I will never be convinced otherwise that the desires of our heart are not random. They are in fact eternal and altogether necessary. It’s far too easy when the path turns rocky to convince ourselves that we don’t have what it takes to go the distance and grasp the prize – or worse, allow others to tell us what we’re capable of, where we fit, and what we should be doing. Trust in your abilities and love what you create. It all begins and ends with the faith you pack-up and carry along on the journey. Dare to be unique, aspire to be remarkable.


What are some of your favorite books?

My first favorite book was The Secret Garden, but my favorite book of all time is To Kill a Mockingbird. Not only do I love everything about the story and characters, but I remember reading it for the first time when I was in middle school and thinking how desperately I wished I could write like Harper Lee. Another favorite is The Great Gatsby, and most books by Augusten Burroughs. A Girl Named Zippy is a funny, touching, beautifully written memoir. And I recently read and loved both Water for Elephants and Mockingjay.



Is there anything else you would like to add?

The goals we create for ourselves and the dreams we aspire too are the difference between a life lived and one truly fulfilled. Being sidetracked by chance or circumstance, not having the necessary education, name tag, or street address, are movable roadblocks and absolutely not cause to abandon those things we’ve set out to accomplish.

And it does help considerably, if like me, you find that you really don’t like taking ‘no’ for an answer. So that when a door refuses to open to your polite knocking, you know to just go around back and slip-in through that crack in the window. If you’re put in the time, done the work, followed the rules and still haven’t gotten an invitation, then maybe it’s time to put on your best outfit and crash the party.


Connect with Barbara

• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/The-Secret-of-Lies-Novel/195421757151252 
• Website: http://www.barbaraforteabate.com 
• Book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaCPx-tKeW0&feature=channel

Contest for Women Writers Announced at SheWrites.com

Today, on the one-year anniversary of She Writes (www.shewrites.com), founders Kamy Wicoff and Deborah Siegel announce The Passion Project, a contest open to an emerging author and member of She Writes with a nonfiction book project in the works.

The Passion Project enables a hand-picked A-team of writing and publishing experts to choose a book project by a first-time author and to donate their time to its advancement, giving it every possible chance to succeed.

“She Writes was founded on the premise that writing can be life- and world-changing for women, that no woman writer is an island, and that publishing expertise should be available to every writer, not only those who can afford to pay,” said Wicoff. The contest embodies the company’s mission.

The Passion Project borrows its name from a common term used inside publishing houses to refer to a book an editor loves with a passion, even if it’s not a lucrative project. Judges include literary agents Betsy Lerner and Erin Hosier; Brooke Warner, publisher of Seal Press; author and journalist Alissa Quart; and Wicoff and Siegel themselves. The Project’s co-directors, Lea Beresford and Amanda Johnson Moon, are editors who hail from inside of traditional publishing (Random House and Basic Books, most recently).

The winner will be selected on the basis of the merit of her entry, which consists of a cover letter and a 2,000 word excerpt. She will receive thorough and supportive consultations from a team of experts designed to help her prepare a complete proposal for submission to agents or publishers. Entries are due August 1st, 2010, and finalists will be announced and their excerpts posted on August 27th, at www.shewrites.com. A winner will be announced on August 24th.

To enter the contest, and/or to join this wonderful online community for women writers, visit www.shewrites.com.

Interview with Kevin McNamee

Kevin McNamee is a writer and poet living in Yonkers, NY. He primarily writes for the children’s market. His work has appeared in Beyond Centauri and he has several children’s picture books being published by Guardian Angel Publishing, Inc. His first book, If I Could Be Anything, is available at www.amazon.com, or ask your local bookstore. Look for other titles by Kevin including The Sister Exchange, The Soggy Town of Hilltop, Lightning Strikes, Papa’s Suns, and more.

When Kevin isn’t writing, he spends his time playing hide and seek, at the insistence of his five year old daughter, and at his day job, at the insistence of his wife. When time permits, Kevin also enjoys fossil hunting, home-brewing beer, and gardening. He is currently engaged in an epic battle against roving gangs of crazed squirrels who are digging up everything in sight. (The squirrels are winning.)

Kevin was kind enough to take time out of his busy day to answer some questions about his life as a writer!

Can you describe the time you realized you were indeed a "real" writer?

Somewhere along the way, I stopped doubting my ability. A rejection of my manuscript ceased to be a rejection of myself. A rejection letter became an opportunity to send my manuscript somewhere else. Comments and criticism became opportunities to strengthen my story, revise something unworkable, or something to ignore altogether if it didn't fit with my vision of the story. I was able to refer to myself as a writer without feeling self conscious and … oh yeah, someone was willing to pay me for what I wrote.

What are your future goals for your writing?

I've been focusing primarily on picture books and I would like to branch out to middle readers and Young Adult novels. I have two middle readers in various stages of completion.

Can you describe a typical writing day for you?

There’s no such thing as a typical writing day for me. I try to do something writing related every day. But what I'm doing may vary. Sometimes I'm writing new material, sometimes I'm revising, sometimes I'm critiquing, sometimes I'm researching, sometimes I'm promoting. Due to the demands on my time, I've needed to adopt the philosophy of doing what I can, when I can.


Why do you write?

I first started writing in the second grade. I wrote a poem that was displayed outside the classroom and I liked seeing my poem and my name in public like that. I found that I took to writing naturally. Growing up, I was a constant daydreamer and would construct stories in my head all the time. Eventually, I started writing them down. Throughout my teenage years and throughout adulthood I always felt compelled to write. Although there were many, many times that I put creative writing on the back burner, I found that I was still writing at my day job; memos, procedures, proposals, requests, and I was receiving recognition for it. I realized that writing had been a constant in my life, but I wasn’t writing what I wanted to write. Now I make sure that I write what I want as well.

What writer most inspires you? Why?

I would say that the writers that I meet both online and in person inspire me the most. They all share the same passion and dedication as I do. They understand the struggles and sacrifices involved in being a writer.

Thanks, Kevin, for stopping by today!

To find out more about Kevin, visit his website at http://www.kevinmcnamee.com or visit his blog at http://www.kevinmcnameechildrensauthor.blogspot.com

Tour with VBT-Writers on the Move. New and famous authors, plus useful information. http://vbt-writersonthemove.blogspot.com/

Guest on Radio Show

Recently I was honored to be a guest on The Homeschool Companion Radio Show to talk about the cartoon I write for Listen Magazine, "Windermere Blogosphere." I also talked with the delightful hosts Rose and Candy about following my passion, overcoming rejection and disappointment, and lessons I've learned through my nonprofit literacy foundation "Write On!". You can listen to the full interview at this link:

http://www.lifetalk.net/media/HSCompanion/mp3/HS080924.mp3

Big thanks to Rose, Candy, and my amazing editor Celeste Perrino-Walker!