by Carolyn Martin, President, Board of Directors
What a productive year 2013 has been for VoiceCatcher!
We hosted seven public readings, three month-long art exhibits and two fundraising workshops. (Thanks again to instructors Willa Schneberg and Lyssa Tall Anolik for helping us stay in the black!)
The Summer 2013 issue of VoiceCatcher: a journal of women’s voices & visions attracted over 7,000 first-time visitors.
We nominated six outstanding authors for the 2014 Pushcart Prize.
We rolled out a new brochure and bookmark – thanks to our Marketing Director, Theresa Snyder, and eye-catching event flyers – thanks to our graphic artist, Ashley-Renée Cribbins.
Courtesy of Lisa Sudo, our treasurer/secretary, we added the Evite platofrm to our PR efforts.
We’re working with Wayne Potter, producer and host of the Keeping Kurrent Show, an international digital radio program, to bring our contributors’ voices to the airwaves in 2014.
We welcomed Barbara Berger as a new Website Editor. She’s joining Deb Scott, Website Administrator and Design Manager, and Heidi McGreal, Website Editor, on the hardworking team that keeps our website humming on such a professional level.
Barbara E. Berger cheerfully comes to VoiceCatcher upon retiring from Oregon state government. As a management analyst, she wrote proposals, research reports and speeches. Now she refocuses on first loves: fiction, poetry and journaling. A Bronx, New York native, Barbara attended the City College of New York. She moved to Portland in 1974 and later earned her bachelor’s in arts and letters from Portland State University. Her book reviews and author interviews have appeared in El Hispanic News; her humor writing in VoiceCatcher 2. Barbara has shared her original photography in juried exhibits in Portland since 2008.
When they come, we will build it
For the past two years, VoiceCatcher has dreamed of creating a mentoring program to deepen our mission of connecting, inspiring and empowering local women writers. With the arrival of new volunteers – Carol Ellis, Ph.D., Tricia Knoll, Sally K Lehman, Pattie Palmer-Baker and Kristin Roedell – we’re in the process of building this new addition to our organization. The mentorship team met on November 11, 2013 and is planning to roll out the specifics of the program early in 2014.
Top: Sally K Lehman, Carol Ellis
Bottom: Pattie Palmer-Baker, Kristin Roedell, Tricia Knoll
When we asked our new mentoring director, Carol Ellis, about her vision of mentoring, she offered this unique perspective:
To mentor is to love. Mentoring is … a dance duet of equals, each with something to give to the other, and, by their relationship, giving a positive example of learning to the world. Mentoring is conversation focused on writing, the writer, the written … . Mentoring is audience. [It] means paying attention to what your colleague-in-learning values and what you come to value and witness: the creative life endlessly reinventing itself.
Meet the mentorship team
Carol Ellis was born in Detroit, Michigan, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. She’s been around the academic block with her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. Her poems and essays are published in anthologies and journals including ZYZZYVA, Comstock Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Alehouse Review, White Pelican Review, Coe Review, California Quarterly, The Whirlwind Review, The Coachella Review, Chest Journal and San Pedro River Review. Her poetry chapbook, I Want A Job, is being published by Finishing Line Press.
Tricia Knoll is a feminist poet deeply interested in ecology, gardening, hula hooping, dancing and running. She writes haiku and poetry and her work appears in numerous literary and haiku journals as well as a couple of anthologies. Her chapbook, Urban Wild, will be published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press. She is deeply grateful to VoiceCatcher for providing support and encouragement to Portland’s women poets.
Sally K Lehman is the author of The Unit-Room 154 and Living in the Second Tense, and the novella Small Minutes (available on Amazon Kindle). She has had poetry and stories published in several online literary magazines including Bewildering Stories, The Scruffy Dog Review, Ascent Aspirations and the Fall 2012 edition of VoiceCatcher: a journal of women’s voices & visions. For more about Sally, visit SallyKLehman.com and TheIncidentalPoet.com.
Pattie Palmer-Baker’s creative output is often a partnership between her poetry and the book arts of calligraphy and paste paper, but it is the poem that inspires the image and always appears somewhere in the finished collage. None of her artwork is without a poem but many of her poems stand alone. Whether she is writing or creating an artwork, she translates the inner world into media that moves the reader away from and out of his/her habitual perception of the world. Pattie’s poem “The Hand-Off” was recently nominated by VoiceCatcher journal editors for the 2014 Pushcart Prize.
Kristin Roedell is the author of Seeing in the Dark (Tomato Can Press), Girls with Gardenias, (Flutter Press) and Night Circus (Legal Studies Forum). She was twice nominated for Best of the Web and once for a Pushcart Prize, was the 2013 winner of NISA’s 11th Annual Open Minds Quarterly Poetry Contest and was a finalist in the Crab Creek Review poetry contest. She has served as an editor, written reviews and read her poetry in many venues, including Portland, Vancouver and Seattle. She lives in Lakewood, Washington with her husband and daughter. Visit her website.
Volunteering pays
As a collaborative community, we at VoiceCatcher view volunteering as a win/win opportunity to learn new skills, share expertise, network with other talented women and grow in the process.
We have written job recommendations based on our volunteers’ contributions, helped edit essays for graduate school applications, trained one another in technical areas like WordPress and Facebook. We have learned to become more astute editors as we work closely with contributors to our journal and website. And, we are proud that some of our website contributors and editors have been offered paid opportunities based on the skills they use for VoiceCatcher.
In the process, we’ve grown to appreciate all the dedicated hours each of us offers to the community – and applaud what we offer each other in return.
If you’re interested in sharing this VoiceCatcher experience with us, contact us.
We are looking for mentors, editors, tech-savvy women, website contributors, board members, and creators of new opportunities to take our voices and visions out into the world. If you come, we just may build it in 2014!