Chippewa Valley Literary Journal Kick-Off Meeting; Thursday, October 27th; L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library; 6:00 PM Pizza, 6:30 Meeting; Everyone is welcome!
By Eric Rasmussen (above)
Supporting writers is not hard. Anyone can do it. Make sure your writer has enough food and water. Writers can get lonely during the day, so creating a community of writers will help them all thrive. You’ll need to brush your writer to avoid knots and excessive shedding. Occasional praise will also help your writer grow and succeed.
And, after meeting their basic needs, if at all possible, give them a place to publish their writing. They work very hard at it, many with the hope that they can share their words and ideas with the world.
The Chippewa Valley Writers’ Guild exists to support writers, which means it’s time to take that next step. We are going to publish some of your writing. With your help, we are starting a literary journal with a local focus. Its pages will be filled with fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from people with some connection to the Chippewa Valley, and we plan to work like the dickens to promote your work and provide something worthwhile to everyone – our submitters, the authors we publish, and the larger community.
We would be honored if you would help. We need everything. We need ideas, for the title (we like Barstow & Grand, but what about The Falsetto Woodsman?), for the submission guidelines, for the marketing and production and distribution, for all of it. We need people to read submissions and help edit the final product. We need your help spreading the word when submissions open, and most importantly, we need you to send in your work so we can fill issue #1 with the incredible quality we’ve seen over the past year.
Please join us on October 27th at 6:00 p.m. in the Eau Claire room at the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library for our Kick-Off Meeting and Planning Session. We’ll provide the pizza and soda if you provide your thoughts and opinions. Whether you’d like to be a part of the team that puts the journal together, or you have ideas you’d like to share, or you just want to hang with a bunch of folks about to embark on something cool, we’d love to have you.
There is nothing quite like the feeling of fostering a writer all the way through to maturity. By helping build an outlet for local creatives to publish their work, you can experience that feeling too.