Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Kelly Williams Brown to be Keynote at Willamette Writers Conference

“From Here to There: Write Like It’s Your Job”

Kelly Williams Brown started with a blog (now with 140,000 followers), a dream and a manuscript. In 2011 she attended the Willamette Writers Conference, landed an agent, and then watched her book, Adulting: How to Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps, sell at auction. It was published in May 2013. In the fall of 2012, Adulting was also sold to Hollywood for a TV comedy (JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions/ Warner Bros TV with a put-pilot at Fox).

Brown will be the Keynote speaker at the Willamette Writers Award Banquet on August 3 at 7 p.m. sharing her experiences and tips. The banquet will be in the Mt. Hood Ballroom at the Airport Sheraton Hotel in Portland. Doors open with a no-host bar at 6:30. Tickets must be purchased in advance through Willamette Writers for $45 per person.

Brown graduated from Loyola University, New Orleans in 2006. An author, journalist, and copywriter, she lives in Portland Oregon.


About Willamette Writers: Willamette Writers is the largest writers’ organization in Oregon and one of the largest in the United States. Founded in Portland in 1965, it has grown to over 1,800 members with branches in Southern Oregon, Mid-Valley, Salem and the Oregon Coast, and the Cynthia Whitcomb Writing House in West Linn. More detailed information is available at www.willamettewriters.com or by calling 503-305-6729.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Author's Road Interviews Tom McGuane

Tom McGuane

Writer #34

Most of us have a favorite cowboy movie, one of the greats like Rio Bravo, Shane, perhaps one of the versions of True Grit or the ever amusing, Three Amigos. And of course endless arguments have been waged at high noon in many a saloon over which was best.

But for me, two favorites stand tall above all others. To me, all other westerns wore a black hat when the 1976 classic, Missouri Breaks hit the screens. Directed by Arthur Penn and starring Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando with a herd of other famous actors, this strange tale about horse thieves and land barons ended all debate for me about what Western was best.

And a few years later, over the horizon loped along the classic, Tom Horn, (“I ain't never ete a bug that big before….”) one of Steve McQueen’s last movies.

And both were written (Tom Horn was co-written) by a real-life Montana cowboy, Tom McGuane. He's a master storyteller and writer who is a Wallace Stegner Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, leaden with arm-loads of other literary awards -- and he's in both the National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame and the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame.

Come on you scribblers and cowboy wanna-bes, top that!

So it was most exciting and a great honor when McGuane invited us to visit him at his ranch in the wilds of Montana, and to sit in his writing studio to chat with him about his life as a reader and a writer of novels, short stories, and of course screenplays.

And it with great pride that we share with you the results of that chat, and the insights and remembrances that he shared with us on that warm summer day.

George & Salli

Our next interview: Jean Auel

The Authors Road

Thanks for . . .

. . . joining us . . .

. . . on the road!

http://www.authorsroad.com