All you dues-paying Story Circle members, boot up your computers or pick up your pens! SCN's yearly anthology, True Words from Real Women, needs you! Each spring, we publish an anthology of stories and poetry to showcase the wonderful writing of our members. For all the details on submission, go here.
There is no theme for the anthology, and we accept prose and poetry and both short and long pieces, though greater consideration is given to shorter pieces. The word limit for prose is 1000 words and for poetry, 40 lines. We will accept up to three pieces per author for consideration. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2010.What's New #4
--by Susan Wittig Albert
If you're like me, you belong to a gazillion organizations. You're active in a few, an onlooker in more. Some offer resources, most offer just membership.
SCN is one of those organizations that invites you to become an active participant and to use the many resources we offer. If you're serious about documenting your life experiences--through journaling, memoir, drama, poetry, or other art forms--we know that the more you practice, the more you will gain in insight, clarity, and (yes!) skills, techniques, and knowledge. But few of us can do this alone. It takes a village. We're that village. We're here to help.
We've put together a list of the ways that SCN can help you tell your story. We've posted the list here, but let me suggest just a few, from my own experience.
Women's stories are a precious personal, family, community, and cultural resource in a fast-changing world. SCN wants to help you tell yours.
What's New #3, by Susan Wittig Albert
We could have chosen many forms for our new organization. We chose to be a member-supported community--which means that most of SCN's income comes from its members, whose dues support our member services. But we also provide important community services. One example: our book review site, which supports women writers, many small publishers, and women readers. Another example: this blog, which offers a range of significant help for women lifewriters. Some of our community services are self-supporting, like our online classes. Others, like this blog and our book review site, are our gift to you, and a way of fulfilling our mission in the wider world.
Over the years, we have received significant funding support from the community. In 1999, a major foundation grant of $100,000 helped us to get our OWl-Circle Project underway. An anonymous gift of $50,000 helped to put SCN on a firm financial footing through the middle years of this decade. Over the past dozen years since we began, many other gifts, large and small, have augmented the direct support we receive from our members.
Money does matter. We can continue to do what we're doing only as long as we can pay for it. As SCN's president reminded us in a recent eletter, times are tough everywhere, for everyone--but especially for SCN. We do a lot with a little, but we do need that little. So please consider this post as an invitation to help us out, whether you're a member of our SCN community or of the wider world of women who care about women's stories. We've made it easy. Go here to see how you can help SCN carry out its work.
Thank you for anything you can do to help.
--by Susan Wittig Albert
What's new? What's old? It's hard to believe, but the conference Story Circle is planning right now is our fifth national conference. We held the first one in 2002, another in 2004, then 2006, 2008, and coming up, February 5-7, 2010.
Those of us who were involved in planning that first conference eight years ago felt we were very brave--and very ambitious. After all, Story Circle was only four years old (it was founded in 1997). It was a small, local organization, and memoir had not yet taken its place as the significant and popular literary form that it would become over the next few years. And women's memoir? Who had heard of such a thing? The lifestories worth telling were men's stories, weren't they? With the exception, of course, of a few exceptional women, already famous for other reasons, whose stories were "worth" publishing. The idea that ordinary women might have extraordinary stories to tell . . . well, that idea was just a little radical.
But the 27 women who made up that first planning group put their collective shoulders to the wheel (metaphorically speaking). They thought hard, pushed harder, and pulled off an exciting, moving, heart-warming conference. Judith Helburn came up with the name, "Stories From the Heart," in part because the conference was held near Valentine's Day, but also because that's what Story Circle has always been all about: discovering the stories that are close to women's hearts. We worried that it would not be well attended (this was just five months after 9/11/01), but it was: 128 wonderful women came to the Town Lake Holiday Inn, in Austin TX, and we shared an extraordinary experience.
Now, here it is 2009, and we're planning yet another conference. In the intervening eight years, SCN has become an international women's writing organization, women's memoir has mushroomed into a publishing phenomenon, and "life story" has been recognized as an important literary form--creative nonfiction, it's sometimes called, which sometimes makes me chuckle: it sounds so academic--downright stuffy, don't you think? (Here at Story Circle, we just call it "telling our stories.")
But the aim of our biennial conference hasn't changed one bit. We are here to remind ourselves and others that women's stories--stories of family life, loves gained and lost, career challenges, educational aims, dreams of owning our own businesses, along with recipes and quilt patterns and family legends--these are important stories. They deserve to be written.
This week at SCN, the program for the 2010 conference settled into shape. You can get a preliminary look at it on the conference website. We're working on other aspects of the conference, too: publicity, the silent auction, the vendor area. But you know what? The women who are contributing their time and energy are doing it with the same vigor, dedication, and creativity that we saw in that first team of planners, eight years ago. Gotta love it when women roll up their sleeves and decide to do something!
And two other upcoming events to tell you about: two SCN-sponsored Be Our Guest programs featuring author Janet Conner, one in Austin TX (September 28), the other in San Antonio TX (October 1). Join us!
What's New #1, by Susan Wittig Albert
This is the first post in a new series here at HerStories: posts about the ongoing life and work and women of the Story Circle Network. In every post, I’ll try to include a bit of SCN’s backstory, as well as information about what we’re currently up to. In this post, a few introductions to start off with.
Who am I? I’m Susan Albert. I’ve been a Story Circle member since the very beginning. I’ve also been SCN’s president and a board member; now, I’m an active volunteer and a passionate supporter of SCN's work and mission.
What is SCN? SCN is an international nonprofit organization for women who want to write about their lives. At SCN, we believe that lifewriting helps us discover our essential selves: our past, present, future. We want to learn about the lives of other women, because their lives help us to see our own more clearly. Our focus is on sharing our stories, in as many media as possible.
SCN was born in March, 1997, midwifed by a dozen wise and strong women in Austin TX. I’m usually named as the organization’s mother/founder, and in one sense, I am: I wrote the original charter and mission statement and assembled that first board of directors, and I’ve been a supporter and cheerleader ever since. But over the years, SCN has had many, many mothers. I’m just the first in a long line--or rather, in a strong and loving circle of women who have embraced SCN and nurtured it with their energies.
I want to honor one of those mothers, Peggy Moody. Her interests coincided with SCN’s from the beginning. Peggy has been our webmistress for over a decade and our executive director since 2003. She put SCN online, gave us the tools we needed to strengthen and enhance our board’ communications and activities, and enabled us to offer online programs we hardly dared to dream about a decade ago. We often think of Peggy as She-Who-Without-Whom-Nothing-Happens. It’s true in more ways than any of us can count.
What’s new at SCN? Here are a few highlights:
More to come. I’ll be posting regular updates to this blog, to let you know about the things we are doing at SCN. In the meantime, check out the other bloggers here at HerStories, women who have something important to say about the important subject of lifewriting.
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