by CWC Marin administrator | Jul 29, 2015 | Events
Every other year, each California Writers Club branch may nominate one member to receive a Jack London Award in recognition of outstanding service to the organization. Joan Steidinger was one of 14 awardees honored at the CWC annual meeting last weekend in Oakland. (That’s Joan with the big smile, second from right near the back.)
Jack London Award Winners 2015 Back Row, left to right: Arthur Carey (Fremont Area Writers), Daniel Stallings (East Sierra), Dennis VanderWerff (Writers of Kern), Paula Chinick (Tri-Valley), Colin Seymour (South Bay). Third Row, left to right: Steve Liddick (Sacramento), Leslie Patiño (Central Coast), Dwight Norris (High Desert), Joan Steidinger, Ph.D. (Marin). Second Row, left to right: Doug Fortier (Mendocino Coast), Jeane Slone (Redwood Writers), Barbara Bentley (Mt. Diablo), Carole J. Bumpus (San Francisco/Peninsula), Jeanette Fratto (Orange County). Front Row, left to right: Donna McCrohan Rosenthal (Jack London Awards committee), David George (CWC president), Joyce Krieg (Jack London Awards committee). Also, Doug Fortier (second row, far left) served as Jack London Awards committee chair.
Joan Steidinger (Marin)
Joan served on the board of CWC-Marin (practically her whole time as a member) since 2010, beginning as director-at-large, program chair, vice president, 2013 CWC-Marin conference chair, and currently as president. Belonging to CWC-Marin and promoting the club has served as a springboard for her general-interest style of writing. You will see her running the trails of Mt. Tam in Mill Valley, California where she lives with her husband, JP, and two goldie dogs, Spencer and Parker.
Joan Steidinger, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist, Certified Consultant through the Association of Applied Sports Psychology and on the United States Olympic Committee’s Registry of Sport Psychology. She has written columns online for PsychologyToday.com and SFGate.com. She has worked as a clinical & sports psychologist for close to 30 years with offices in Mill Valley and San Francisco. Two of her particular interests are women’s issues and sports psychology. She’s been a lifelong athlete. In October 2014, she released her first book, Sisterhood in Sports: How Female Athletes Collaborate and Compete. The book has won the sports category of the following three contests: International Book Awards, National Indie Excellence Awards, and the Beverly Hills Book Awards. The book is a finalist in Foreword Reviews INDIEFAB Book of the Years Awards in the Women’s Issues category.
— See the other winners at calwriters.org
by CWC Marin administrator | Jun 14, 2015 | Events, interview
Short-story writer, essayist, and now novelist Marianne Lonsdale is a founding member of Write On Mamas, a San Francisco Bay Area writers group. She will be presenting “Finding Your Writing Community,” Sunday, June 28, 2 p.m. at the California Writers Club–Marin Branch meeting at Book Passage. I interviewed her on the phone the week after the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, which we both attended, though we never crossed paths.
Q: Tell me about your writing.
I’m working on a novel now, literary fiction. About a woman in her mid-30s in Oakland, in 1991. It follows the arc of a stormy relationship. The novel being such a long form, I’m usually also working on a personal essay, which is mostly what I write.
Q: Your talk is on finding your writing community. Why is that important?
For me, finding a writing a community that I liked was a surprise. I usually think of myself as introverted. But I found that being involved with other writers keeps me energized. I hear a lot of the same stuff at these workshops and gatherings, but I’m riveted nonetheless. I feel like I’ve found my passion. Last year, Brooke Warner, my writing coach, asked me on behalf of someone she was working with what tips I would give someone about being involved in writing communities, and at first I was taken aback, and then I realized how much I’ve become engaged in these communities, several of them.
I’m not a very published writer. I wouldn’t have the opportunity to get my work out there if I weren’t making connections.
Q: How have you made those connections?
One was through Left Coast Writers, led by Linda Watanabe McFerrin, at Book Passage. She pushed me to pitch my work, helped me find a home at this literary website called Literary Mamas. I stumbled into an opportunity I would not have otherwise known about. The other place was the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, where what I gained more than anything tangible was the feeling of community. It was the first time I felt such a bond with other writers. I wanted to keep that bond going. After I joined Left Coast Writers, I help found Write on Mamas in 2012.
It started as a small group. We write for the first 90 minutes of the meeting, and for some people, that’s the only time of the month they carve out time to write. We meet meet the second Sunday of every month at Mill Valley’s O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, and we also have been sponsoring some readings and interviews at the Mill Valley Library.
Q: How have you benefited most from your writing community?
Write On Mamas published an anthology that included a piece of mine, and we had readings all around the bay. I was thrilled to read as part of the launch at Diesel Books. I would not have been part of that anthology if I hadn’t been part of this community.
Some of the women I met at Write on Mamas also produced “Listen to Your Mother,” a national event leading up to Mothers’ Day that grew out of the blogging community. The national organization looks for local moms to put on the show. We sold out the Brava Theater in San Francisco.
Last year, I also curated a Write On Mamas’ event for LitCrawl, called “Your Mom Had Sex.”
Q: In Write On Mamas, how do you balance skilled and published authors with newbies?
The group is open to writers of all levels, published as well as those who do more thinking about writing than writing. It’s more of a salon than critique group. We write, then get short critiques, what I call “critique lite.” It’s a very nurturing community.
Q: What do you do when you’re not writing?
I work full time at Clorox, manage HR operations. I live in Oakland with my husband and 18-year-old son, who’s soon to leave for college. I’m going to take over his bedroom for a study. A big step. A writing space of my own.
Q: When did you first start identifying yourself as a writer?
That what my piece in the Write On Mama’s anthology is about. I remember as young child being interested in writing, but I didn’t start until I was in my 40s, after the birth of my son. I took a writing class Piedmont Adult School.
Q: Who do you like to read?
I read widely. Literary fiction, personal essays. I love the essays in The Sun. I recently finished Armistead Maupin’s Last Tales of the City. An Irish mystery writer named Tana French. We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas, was fabulous. I also liked The Dovekeepers, by Alice Hoffman.
Q: What do you know now that you didn’t used to know about writing?
I used to think that being part of writing groups and writing communities would take time away from my writing. Instead, I get more pages written because of the energy and opportunity. In my early years of writing, I didn’t meet people. I didn’t realize how welcome I’d be at most readings and workshops.
Join Marianne Lonsdale Sunday, June 28, 2 p.m. at Book Passage for the California Writers Club–Marin June meeting. You can find her essay, “Giving Birth to Creativity,” in Mamas Write: 29 Tales of Truth, Wit, and Grit. There’s more at mariannelonsdale.com.
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.
Joan served on the board of CWC-Marin (practically her whole time as a member) since 2010, beginning as director-at-large, program chair, vice president, 2013 CWC-Marin conference chair, and currently as president. Belonging to CWC-Marin and promoting the club has served as a springboard for her general-interest style of writing. You will see her running the trails of Mt. Tam in Mill Valley, California where she lives with her husband, JP, and two goldie dogs, Spencer and Parker.
