Scholarships: Notre Dame de Namur University is offering a $20,000 creative writing scholarship to a California high school junior or senior who wins the San Mateo County Fair Literary Contest.

To qualify, the student must have a 3.0 GPA or above, submit a poem, short story, or essay (limited to one entry per applicant) that has not been previously entered in a San Mateo County Fair competition, and enroll and be accepted to Notre Dame de Namur within one year of graduating from high school. The submission deadline is April 16, 2012.
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Writing Contest: The opportunity to become a published author by Sand Hill Review Press is also being offered by the San Mateo County Fair Literary Anthology 2012.
Enter a short story, poetry, essay, and sponsored contest submissions. All entries must be submitted in .doc or .docx file.

Every entrant will have at least one piece published, which will be available for purchase at the Fair between June 9 to June 17 and also on www.Amazon.com.

For entry forms or more details about both literary opportunities, visit www.sanmateocountyfair.com, call 650-574-3247 or email literary@smeventcenter.com. The submission deadline for both is April 16.
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An ordination–the ceremonial confirmation of a man of the cloth, by the church whos precepts he has chosen, to the congregatin that has chosen him, is very like a marriage. I certainly had no notion of this idea before my own pastor Paul Mowry was ordained at Sausalito Presbyterian yesterday (January 29, 2012).

The ceremony itself is detailed in specific ways by the Presbytery, accompanied by a more elaborate, less structured personal confirmation by those who have come to know him and speak to and for him before the congregation (a full church, and it isn’t even Christmas or Easter).

From the elders of the church, a series of “charges”, to which the answer is “I do” or “I will.” These are serious commitments. Life long, grounded in faith that THIS moment, that THESE words, are to stand for all time.

There is a purity to those words, “I do.” They shine for the moment with almighty fire, and a faith that the future will comfirm this commitment. We can never know what will come, so we give our all to the day that is in hand and trust that faith will be redeemed.

Pacifica Spindrift Players
Opening Night 1/6/12

One of the many rewards of going to small theater productions (Pacifica’s Spindrift theater seats 98) is chatting with the cast and crew in the lobby after the show. There Elisa Valentine (Maggie in the current run of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) told me that is one role every actress wants to play: she can be by turns shrewd, seductive, a sweetheart, a vamp, and of course, catty to the hilt. All in the first act, where Valentine’s Maggie owns the stage. She shares it with a sullen, almost absent husband (Collin Wenzell as Brick), a washed-up sportscaster with too much on his mind that he tries to drown with alcohol.

He doesn’t say much; just lies on the sofa seeming asleep, or gets up to pour himself another drink while Maggie in what amounts to an extended soliloquy alternately berates, cajoles, flatters, and attempts to seduce him. Nothing doing, for this scene. Brick’s not having any of it. “How long does this have to go on? . . Go on, take a lover. You know you want to.” Outside their bedroom window, others in the household of this decaying southern mansion are listening in. We in the audience are too. The secrets unfold themselves slowly.

Partly it’s the masterful script, but more the details of the production that create this world. The very clever set design by Henry Sellenthin gives us on one stage a bedroom, parlor, a hallway outside a door, a balcony, and a star-filled night sky (by lighting designer Carson Duper) just outside the French doors. There’s more air and frame than wall and scrim; bars on the railing, the transom, the brass bedstead all give the subtlest hint of how these lives are contained in cages. The characters don’t see them, but we do.

And oh, those characters! Williams gave them words to say, but fine acting by the entire cast breathes life into them. In the second act Wenzell’s lethargic Brick catches fire, slowly, as his overbearing, sonofabitch father (John Musgrave as Big Daddy) confronts him over his constant drunkenness. This son’s a disgrace, the other one’s a disappointment, and he has no trouble expressing himself about it. Brick takes it all in, another reason to fail.

Big Daddy’s slowly dying although he doesn’t know it. He’s heartbroken. He won’t let anyone see it, but we can hear it by the unconscious catch in his voice when he says Brick’s name. The second act builds slowly, gracefully under Gary Pugh-Newman’s patient direction. One by one the layers that father and son had both so carefully protected themselves with are peeled away and we see depths in each of them that they cannot see for themselves. The second act belongs to them. At odd moments each reveals to the other–if not to himself–aspects kept concealed their entire lives together. In a slow ballet they move toward each other, then pull away.

The play was written in 1955. Brick’s implied homosexuality–Big Daddy says his son’s too-close friendship with another young man was “not exactly normal”–and the importance of keeping it a secret, was a big deal then. But in this play, nothing is quite what it seems. Yes, Brick and Skipper were very, very close, but “It was pure and true, and that’s not normal.” A deep, deep friendship, gone to ruin over fear of what others might have said. Brick has crippled himself with alcohol over this, and will not hear his father’s kind words, or recognize his father’s love. But we do.

Supporting actors enter and depart, preparing the way for the fine ensemble work of the third act, when every one of them gets to take center stage for a time, and makes good use of it. Characters who previously had been more walk-ons burst into life, each with his own heartache, fear, intrigue, betrayal. Big Mama (Joan Pugh-Newman) finally learns the truth about her husband–he’s dying, this man who has held her in such contempt for forty years, and she won’t hear a word of any of it. By the final curtain, we’ve seen them all, and recognized ourselves in them.

This remarkable production by Pacifica Spindrift Players is replete with subtleties of lighting, set design, acting, and direction of this remarkable production that do not lend them selves to simple description. You really must go see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to see all of what I mean.

Through January 29. 2012

www.pacificaspindriftplayers.org
650-359-8002

It is a big topic. Not just about Tom Crean, though he is the subject of my book. But the idea is much larger than one man and his adventures. It reaches into the more abstract realms of leadership and followership–how we are all interdependent in our entrprises, whether they be on ice or the sea or anywhere you can name in life itself: classroom, family, work, teamwork on the athletic field.

Can the leader–teacher, quarterback, captain of the ship, president of the nation, explorer–depend on those under is direction to fulfill their roles? And equally as important, can the follower trust his leader to make wise decisions, to stand firm when it is necessary and to flex when it is not?

It is in the talking out of Crean’s story that these ideas come to light. And, judging from some of the conversations had with the future ship-captains and mates after it was all done, there was some illumination done.

According to their website, right now (6:24 a.m. December 1, 2011) there are currently 27494 users online. Started in 1999 with 21 participants and six winners. Stats not in for this year, but in 2010 there were 200,500 participants and 37,500 winners

On the NaNoWriMo website, this page: “Life After NaNoWriMo” with these (and other threads):
–National Novel Finishing Month?
–So You’ve Written a Novel, Now What?
–Didn’t win, but definately glad I participated!
and
–When one WriMo just isn’t enough…

Michael Smith’s admirable biography “Captain Francis Crozier: Last Man Standing” provides the reader practically all there is to know about this man, including his doomed affection for Sophy Cracroft, his friendships with other polar explorers. Snippets of his personal letters give us insights into the state of his thinking, his feelings.

It is these letters that provide the springboard for imagination. Fictional correspondence reveals what might have been, what might have most desired. How each of the characters in my book “Frozen Heart: A Victorian Romance of Letters” (working title for the 2011 NaNoWriMo Winner) MIGHT have felt about one another.

And since they were in 1845 not so different from us in 2011, their fears and passions run as wildly as do ours, in sometimes contradictory directions. To depths they might not have wanted us to know, that they presumed to be confidential in the letters I had them write.

Such letters, the ones in fair copy that we read over their shoulders before the ink is dry, never existed. And yet through them we see these souls–Crozier, Sophy, John Franklin, Lady Jane, Fitzjames–in a light that would never have shone on them, if not for the magic of fiction.

Should you be so inclined (and I heartily endorse the idea for 2012) it helps to have (1) a fairly good idea what your novel is–where it begins and ends, who the main characters are, and what it is that happens to them during the course of the work. And a passion for discovering everything that might lie in between.

I knew who Francis and Sophy were, when they lived and how they related (or did not) to each other. All the rest is discovery, and fiction.

And what a treat it was, to read that book for the very first time, as I was writing it.

Ideally, the result is one extended burst of creative energy resulting in: A Book! In my case, it is an enlargement of the Francis and Sophy Victorian Romance that inspired the one-act play of the same name. A story that spreads across two continents, with rivalries, intrigues, and affaires de coeur.

For me, a wonderfully enlightening process. It only took 22 days of obsession to reach it.

Program Two this year, overall was a bit uneven, but harbored within its two-and-one-half hours the best single offering for the Fall 2011 Fringe.

It started off with a well-written, well-acted look into the living room of Maureen Coyne and Alan Badger as an ordinary couple, talking to each other about family conflicts in a way you will find totally familiar, as they wait for the arrival of a taxi for the airport in “Waiting to Go.” Steve North returns with another of his insightful, inciting monologues, this time with at tale of two dogs, a couple of people, the tragedy of everyday life, and an off-the-cuff, straight-from-the-heart tribute to all our veterans on the 11/11/11 day of this performance. Program manager, playwright, director, and actress Suzanne Birrell came up with a seriously funny “Saturday in the Park with Vic” involving an innocuous photographer and two loopy birdwatchers who overhear his half of a cell-phone conversation. Rick Roitinger and Claudia Rosa are two lonely people who take adjacent benches in a city park week after week, and never quite connect in “Love Birds,” sympathetically directed by Carol Eggers.

After intermission, we watch the slow dissolution, the song and dance of two unhappily married couples trying to find “The Perfect Step.” Rick Roitinger and Claudia Rosa return to the stage to the very compelling medical tragedy, the conflict between the miracle of modern medicine and the love of a mother for her child that knows no bounds in Kenneth J. Nugent’s”The Finger,” superbly directed by Tim Giugni. The evening ends on a lighter note, the pilgrimage of a seeker to the mountain home of a mystical guru whose wisdom is conveyed in goofy jokes that belie its true depth. “Everything is beautiful, because we’re doomed! If you’re living, you should be smiling.”