by CWC Marin administrator | Apr 23, 2015 | Events, interview
On Sunday, April 26, Dr. Joan Steidinger, president of the California Writers Club–Marin, will discuss her book, Sisterhood in Sports: How Female Athletes Collaborate and Compete. Her focus will be on the journey from idea to publication. Below is a brief preview. (Come to Book Passage on Sunday to hear more.)
Interview with Joan Steidinger
Dr. Joan Steidinger interviewed by Frank Mallicot on KPIX Bay Sunday
Q: Tell me about the book.
Sisterhood in Sports is about what drives the female athlete: emotional and intimate relationships, detailed and verbal communication, a sense of community, and applying the principles of female collaborative competition.
In the last chapter of the book, I create and describe a model of female collaborative competition. Women are different in their minds and brains than men. They will perform their best if they use their brain’s strengths—emotional-focus on relationships, verbal and detailed communications, empathic, worrying a little bit, but not too much, relying on their intuition.
Women are not just small men.
Q: Might not men benefit from this approach? I know from my own experience when I was a kid how unempathetic, even cruel boys could be when it came to competitive sports.
Women and men are different. It doesn’t mean male athletes might not do adopt some of these principles, but my approach is aimed at women.
Q: How did the book came to be?
The idea showed up in 1994 — spurred on by the book Women Who Love Too Much, how it said to women that their emphasis on emotion in relationships was a problematic behavior. The author contended that women needed to quit having this focus.
What I started seeing in my practice as a psychologist was that most women were emotionally focused on their relationships and empathic. This just comes naturally to them, even in competitive sports.
I’ve been writing about this for years — I’ve written 60 articles on women in sports, before the book came to fruition.
In 1997, I wrote my first book proposal. Every publisher that I gave it to rejected it. Then I got sidetracked with cycling double centuries with my soon-to-be husband, John, and had a terrible bike wreck in 2003.
In 2009, I got back to the book. My husband suggested joining a writing group. This was an important turning point in the development of the current book. I interviewed 85 women and a few male coaches, including Olympians, pros, elite amateurs, and a few recreational, competitive female athletes. The age range was from teens to women in their 80s.
Q: Was there a pivotal moment along this journey?
When Linda Watanabe invited to be in her advanced writers group, that provided me the confidence to continue working on my book. As a lifelong athlete, one of the reasons that I became a sports psychologist was the sense that it was important to give permission to women athletes to be who they are.
One evening, I went to San Rafael to work with a basketball team that had lost every game that season. Now they had a slim chance to win a game. When I spoke with them, the team’s energy was low. I asked about their motivation. Most said 5 or 6, on a scale of 1-10 and one girl said 8. Surprisingly, one girl yelled out 25. I asked what would it take to get all of the team to 25? The girls started repeating things I had said. To be determined. To be persistent. To never give up!
The next day, the girls won their game by 35 points. The coach said she’d never seen anything like it. All I did was allow the girls to be themselves. That’s the whole reason.
That gave me the motivation to keep doing this kind of work. To give women permission to be themselves as athletes and women.
Q: Tell me about promoting your book. You’ve been busy.
Thus far, I’ve appeared in 45 different types of venues, including in person, on panels, radio, and TV.
Most of my in-person interviews I set up myself. It took hours and hours of phone work. Emailing back and forth. I had a publicist last spring, and then another one who got me a lot of radio interviews. The sports psychology world opened a lot of doors. I’ve ended up talking about domestic violence, among other things.
(Joan’s 46th venue will be as the feature presentation at the April California Writers Club-Marin meeting. At 2 pm, Sunday, April 26, at Book Passage. She’ll be talking more about the process than the book topic — the fits and stops and spurts. The how more than the what.)
Q: You’re the president of California Writers Club Marin. What is your vision for the branch?
We were just talking about that a week ago. I’d like to get a solid board again and get all the positions filled. I’d like the board to provide more opportunities for social interactions between members, plan a once-a-year conference, and continue offering craft presentations. A major priority is to provide an active, monthly newsletter helping us all get to know, keep up and share with our members.
by CWC Marin administrator | Nov 22, 2014 | Events
Authors Books In Order of Appearance:
Susanna Solomon: Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls
Point Reyes Station: At 10:42 a.m. deputies called for back-up for a “pedestrian who was not following orders.” So begins the short story, “Following Orders” in which we are introduced to the charmingly confused pedestrian, Fred Rhinehart, one of the magical characters author Susanna Solomon has conjured up for us in this collection of short stories, all set in Point Reyes, her scenic and lovely home town in northern California. Though the characters are fictitious, the author conceived of their adventures by pondering on actual Sheriff’s Calls published in her favorite local newspaper, the Point Reyes Light. But Fred is not the only one of Solomon’s characters with whom readers will fall in love. There’s his wife, the cantankerous but loving Mildred; Doris, the local hairdresser, the voluptuous Officer Kettleman and more. It doesn’t take long for all of them to become as real as the town in which the author imagines they live, love and dream.
John Byrne Barry: Bones in the Wash
Albuquerque Mayor Tomas Zamara understands that politics is like playing football on a muddy field. If you don’t get dirty, you’re not giving your all. But dirty politics is not his style. The Democrats’ Barack Obama is drawing adoring crowds with his uplifting speeches, and Zamara’s GOP bosses are pressuring him to do “whatever it takes” to win. Challenging him every step of the way is fierce, young Sierra León of the Democracy Project, who calls on him to listen to his better self and reject his party’s unsavory practices. But if only his life were as simple as politics. Mayor Zamara is also grappling with being a suspect in his wife’s murder; fending off his father, who wants to rescue his failing business with city money; and satisfying his demanding new woman, the radiant and volatile Tory Singer, who may not be who she says she is.
Joan Steidinger: Sisterhood in Sports
Sisterhood in Sports: How Female Athletes Collaborate and Compete tells the stories of all kinds of female athletes in a variety of sports. Their natural tendency to use talking as a primary form of communication is essential to their experiences and successes in sports. Women and girls tend to have BFFs, collaborate during periods of stress, express empathy for one another, worry about themselves and others, and desire to have fun in sports, which makes their experiences of sports and competition different from their male counterparts. Female strengths are grounded in both mind and body, and they take these strengths onto the court, field, and track. There are now dozens of studies showing how the female brain and hormones operate quite differently than those of men. This book reveals the ways in which these differences confirm that intense emotions about relationships are part of the sporting life for female competitors. Joan Steidinger uses real stories to show that women and girls compete at very high levels, but also have a different view of their teammates and opponents, one based on relationships and communication, that impacts performance both on and off the field. They enjoy and revel in sisterhood, even as they fight to win. Understanding this need for connection helps us better understand how female athletes succeed and perform both in sports and in life. Female athletes and anyone who works with them will learn how to better facilitate mastery, competition, collaboration, and connection on and off the field the practice of female collaborative competition.
Joyce Kleiner: Legendary Locals of Mill Valley
Since the 1800s, Mill Valley has attracted spirited freethinkers, entrepreneurs, nature lovers, rabble-rousers, and more than a few rock stars. Early Mill Valley booster Sidney Cushing encouraged tourism with a train up Mount Tamalpais called the Crookedest Railroad in the World. Laura White, more concerned with protecting Mill Valleys natural beauty than attracting more people, brought the town its Outdoor Art Club and a tradition of conservationism. Vera Schultz broke the glass ceiling of local politics in 1946, and in 1973, 10-year-old Jenny Fulles letter to President Nixon changed the future of Americas female athletes. When an elementary school teacher named Rita Abrams wrote a song about why she loved Mill Valley, it became a national hit; so did a song about the heart of rock and roll, written by local boy Huey Lewis, who had attended that same school. The stories of Mill Valleys legendary localswhether from 1890 or 1980are sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes inspiring, often humorous, and always fascinating.
Gael Chandler: Chronicles of Old San Francisco
Discover one of the world’s most unique and fascinating cities through 28 dramatic true stories spanning the colorful history of San Francisco. Author Gael Chandler takes readers through more than 250 years of American history with exciting essays on topics such as the city’s origins to the founding of the Presidio of San Francisco and the Mission San Francisco de Asis to its modern role as the progressive and innovative heart of a nation. Along the way you’ll meet characters like the city’s foremother Juana Briones, Gold Rush entrepreneur Levi Strauss, confectioner Domenico Ghirardelli, gangster Al Capone, the rock legends of Haight-Ashbury, activist politician Harvey Milk, the pioneers of today’s techno boom, and many others who changed the face of the city—plus lesser-known tales, like those of the children of Alcatraz and the story of John McLaren, the architect of Golden Gate Park. In addition, guided walking tours of San Francisco’s historic neighborhoods by the bay and beyond, illustrated with color photographs and period maps, take readers to the places where history really happened.
Marcia Naomi Berger: Marriage Meetings for Lasting Love
Couples can make love last, says psychotherapist and clinical social worker Marcia Naomi Berger. They just need to learn how. Her prescription is deceptively simple: have an interruption-free thirty-minute (or even shorter) meeting each week and follow an agenda that includes the kind of appreciation and planning for fun that foster intimacy and pave the way for collaborative conflict resolution. With this book, you’ll learn how to effectively communicate and connect with your spouse each week, and for a lifetime, with step-by-step guidelines that walk you through the four parts of a marriage meeting: expressing appreciation, coordinating chores, planning for good times, and resolving problems. Inspiring real-life stories demonstrate how transformative these brief meetings can be. The communication tips and techniques Berger has gleaned from helping hundreds of couples will guide you toward a deeper, more lasting love.
Michael Lipsey: Thoughts For All Occasions
In the classic tradition of Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Johnson, and H.L. Mencken, here is a thoughtful, reflective book of distilled wisdom—epigrams. Webster’s dictionary defines an epigram as “A concise, clever, often paradoxical statement”, i.e. a short piece of wisdom, often witty or satiric. These original epigrams by author Michael Lipsey ponder some of life’s greatest questions about living, dying, love, mortality, religion, science, work, health and wealth. They get right to the point, giving fresh insights to those questions in a very few words.
Peter Narodny: Prison to Paradise
This is a story of the power of a prisoner’s dream and the struggle of a family looking for answers in an alien environment. It is the saga of a boy growing up as one of the few whites on a tropical paradise with a life full of adventure, humor, and irreplaceable memories. Prison To Paradise is a tale that spans three generations of a tumultuous family history. Juan Sibul is a Russian revolutionary who is imprisoned for his writings, and after an extraordinary escape, he gets to America where, with the help of notables like Mark Twain, he is influential in changing the course of Russian history. His son Leo is born in New York and matures into a brilliant entrepreneur. He marries an innocent college graduate, and in his search for a better lifestyle, they travel to an unknown Caribbean island where they struggle with making a life for the family. They have three children, and their youngest is Peter, who quickly learns to cope with his wild surroundings, and who now relates his story of a very unique childhood.
