With great joy and an overwhelming sense of the size and strength of the Amherst Writers & Artists community, I would like to thank you all for the contributions you have made to this amazing organization. For over thirty years, we have all put our efforts together to form a dynamic and far-reaching organization.  From Massachusetts to Dublin, from Vancouver to Malawi, from California to North Carolina, the workshop method we all use has helped give voice to thousands.  We are part of a movement that transforms lives and creates art.

I am honored and humbled to be the new Executive Director of AWA.
Your fellow writer and affiliate,
Maureen Buchanan Jones

The new Board of Directors along with Maureen Buchanan Jones, the new Executive Director for Amherst Writers & Artists, spans the United States and brings experience, talent and energy together.  They are proud and excited to put their expertise and their love for the AWA method to work, so that the organization develops into an international movement

Co-Chair SuEllen Pommier is an Associate Professor in the field of breast cancer research in the Department of Surgery at Oregon Health & Science University and a former board member of the scientific advisory committee of the Komen For The Cure Foundation. SuEllen has implemented her experiences in a writing program for women with cancer at the Center for Women's Health, Oregon Health & Science University.

Co-Chair Aaron Zimmerman is the Founder and Executive Director of NY Writers Coalition, which is based on the success of the workshops he began in April 2000 at The Prince George, a supportive housing community for low-income, formerly homeless and special-needs populations. He has been leading creative writing workshops since 1997 through Manhattan Writers, a writing workshop program he founded. In that time, he has worked with hundreds of writers of all genres, ages and backgrounds, and was named as a 2005 Petra Fellow by The Petra Foundation for his "distinctive contributions to the rights, dignity and autonomy of others."

Patricia Bender, Research/ Contract Specialist at Rutgers University, Newark campus, is a professional administrator with extensive teaching and training experience in university and school settings, community and senior centers, and with not-for-profit organizations.  Her work in the university includes founding and directing the campus's first Writing Center, and with the Friends of the Newark Public Library (for whom she serves as board president) she has mentored and created educational and professional development programs, and designed curriculums that foster literacy and create opportunities for civic engagement. Patricia's local efforts to support and grow volunteer efforts, often offered through the city library and university, have met with much success. She has increased the number of volunteers and the amount of external funding in every group that she has worked with or created. Trained by Pat Schneider and the members of the Original Chicopee Workshop, she looks forward to her work with AWA.

Karen Buchinsky is a poet, visual artist, and calligrapher who has been associated with Amherst Writers & Artists since 1994.  She is a member of the Original Chicopee Workshop, and has served on the advisory board of AWA Institute, founded as an outreach program for under-served populations. As a trainer in Amherst Writers & Artists Institute, she helped to prepare hundreds of professional people to use the AWA method in schools, shelters, prisons, and hospitals. She was one of the original facilitators of Voices From Inside, a non-profit program that provides AWA method writing workshops for women who are or have been incarcerated, and she continues with that work.

Christopher DeLorenzo has taught composition at The University of San Francisco, where he earned his MA in Fiction in 1998. He also teaches writing classes in the Bay Area and Los Angeles at The Writing Salon and The Writing Pad respectively, and leads training sessions for writing workshop facilitators in the Amherst Writers and Artists method in California. Since 1999, he has facilitated two on-going AWA weekly writing workshops in his home, called Laguna Writers. www.writingsalon.com

Kate Hymes, a poet and educator living in the Hudson Valley, New York, leads weekly writing workshops and full-day and three-day writing retreats.  She has over twenty years experience as an educator with experience teaching writing at local two- and four-year colleges, and over ten years leading workshops for people who either wish to or make writing their artistic practice. She has co-led AWA trainings with Pat Schneider and other AWA trainers. Kate and Pat also lead the workshop, If We Are Sisters: Black and White Women Writing across Race.  Kate has experience as a resource trainer assisting with Undoing Racism trainings for the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond. She is a Cave Canem fellow. www.wallkillvalleywriters.com

Celia Jeffries has an extensive background in education, journalism, and publishing. She has an MA in British and American literature from Brandeis and an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. Celia worked with Patricia Lee Lewis and trained with Pat Schneider before leading her own writing workshops in the Boston area for six years. Currently, Celia runs a monthly memoir manuscript workshop and is co-director of Writing Journeys, offering writing and yoga retreats around the world. She is on the faculty of Writers in Progress in Northampton, and is an AWA trainer. www.celiajeffries.com

Elise Rymer, a political activist for some years, began concentrating on education as the focal point of her work life in 1982. Working for 23 years with a small non-profit in northern New Mexico, Project Crossroads, she collaborated with teachers and students in developing interdisciplinary, experiential, and expressive arts workshops, curricula, and mini-courses  and  also took part in Soviet-American teacher exchanges and collaborative projects with Harvard's Russian Studies Center, the University of Chicago's Middle Eastern Studies Center, Amherst Writers & Artists, and storyteller Jay O'Callahan.  Since 1996, she's been a member of writing groups based on the AWA approach and has participated in many AWA workshops and retreats.

Laurel Schneider is a writer, poet, and educator.  She lives in Chicago, Illinois where she has taught theology, philosophy and ethics at Chicago Theological Seminary for over a decade.  A member of Pat Schneider's first writing workshop out of the UMass Continuing Education Department in 1978, she has observed the growth and development of Amherst Writers and Artists from its inception. In addition to her informal involvement, she co-led a workshop with Pat at North Central College and co-taught a hybrid theology course/writing workshop with her at Chicago Theological Seminary.

Peter Schneider was ordained a minister in the United Methodist Church in 1955 and married Pat in 1957. He served Wesley Student Foundation in Berkeley and churches in Alameda,Vallejo, and Berkeley, California, then received a fellowship for doctoral studies at Boston University.  In Massachusetts he served churches in Auburndale, Gleasondale and Worcester before being appointed to Wesley Methodist Church, Amherst in 1966.  In 1980 he left the pastorate and worked for ten years in a hydroelectric business. He retired from the business and joined Pat as business manager of AWA.  In 1991 he co-founded Amherst Writers & Artists Institute with other co-founders Sarah Browning, the entire membership of Pat's Chicopee Writing Workshop, and the social worker who first established that workshop, Deb Burwell. He was a member of Kathy Dunn's AWA workshop for four years, acting as her substitute leader.  In 2006 his first book of poems was released by AWA Press, titled Line Fence.

Maureen Buchanan Jones is the newly appointed Executive Director of Amherst Writers and Artists, serving also at this time as Program Director and Co-Director with Christopher DeLorenzo of the AWA training program.  She is an AWA affiliate who leads workshops in Northampton, Massachusetts and leads weekend retreats with Pat Schneider and alone.  She leads a bi-monthly manuscript group, and has led workshops with women who have experienced domestic violence.  She has led AWA trainings in Connecticut, California and Ireland. www.writingfulltilt.com

Recently, in a workshop I was leading in the southern United States, an affiliated workshop leader asked me to tell her how AWA began.  We had time, good glasses of iced tea, and I began with the earliest stories.  When I finished, she said, "Thank you, Pat.  We have a right to know, because we are so committed to the AWA method."  I have thought about the truth of that, and about having such a story-telling history among our archives, housed in the Jones Library, Amherst.  At the invitation of AWA's new executive director, Maureen Jones, I offer here Part One of a story-based history of Amherst Writers & Artists.


PART ONE:  The Deepest Origins: 1930's - 1940's

The beginnings of AWA lie even before my birth.  How we became an international organization with workshops in several countries and all across the United States, is the story of many people in many places, but the deepest origins lie in my life, and in my story, so I hope I will be forgiven for beginning there, and lingering there until that part of the story is told.

My grandmother on my father's side was an illiterate American Indian who in the 1930's, when I was born, signed her name with an "X."  She never learned to read and write; in the 1940's, to be an Indian was shameful; all the movies were about the good guys (cowboys) and the bad guys (Indians), unless they were about the "Yanks" and the "Japs." She hid her Indian origins, and taught her children to hide it, too. She gave birth to nine children, most of whom lived hard lives in rural depression America.

On the other side, my grandmother was a quiet woman married to man who was a passionate social-activist before that term had been invented.  He handed out patent-medicine through the back door of his country store at night, to black people who had been refused care by white doctors.  As a result, the Ku Klux Klan threw a bundle of sticks onto his front porch as a warning. He had a hot temper and passionate opinions about everything.  He lost the family farm by signing on a friend's bad debt, knocked my grandmother down the stairs once, and left a legacy of concern about social justice in the world.

I was born into a family that struggled with poverty and had reason to care about justice.  When I was four, my mother divorced my father for good reasons, and cut his family off entirely from contact with my brother and me - for not such good reasons.

Amherst Writers & Artists has its origin in the deep and complicated history of America's struggle with race and poverty.  It is fitting that we continue to wrestle with that complication by keeping our focus on both the creation of art through language, and on the creation of a more just social order by affirming the power, the beauty, and the importance of every person's voice when it is freed from the constrictions of judgment and the learned disability of not being able to write. Alice Walker has said, "The longer I am a writer -- so long now that my writing finger is periodically numb --  the better I understand what writing is; what it's function is; what it is supposed to do. I learned that the writer's pen is a microphone held up to the mouths of ancestors and even stones of long ago."

My illiterate Indian grandmother and my grandmother silenced by her position in a family dominated by a gifted but complicated husband, have no voice unless I give them voice. Their stories are lost.  How many stories of men and women in prison, in refugee camps, in shelters, homeless, are lost? How many stories of wealthy and middle-class men and women are lost because they have been told they cannot write? Amherst Writers & Artists is about revolution.  It is about changing the ways we define art, until "art" no longer is almost exclusively the expression of those of us with privileged formal education. It is about giving voice to the voiceless, valuing art that is a continuous artesian well, a never-ending stream in the kitchen, the workplace, the intimate conversation.  AWA began with an illiterate Indian woman named Elzina Lakey, and a silenced housewife named Emma Ridgway.

(Next newsletter:  Part II: AWA's origins: 1950's
History of  Amherst Writers & Artists)

On February 8, 2009, thirteen AWA affiliates met in Dublin to inaugurate Amherst Writers Ireland (AWI).  AWI is the newly founded Irish Chapter of AWA Affiliates.  Those present were: Therese Caherty (who convened and facilitated the meeting), Máire O'Donoghue, Adrienne Quinn, Grace French, Alison Barker, Berta Money, Órfhlaith Ní Chonaill, Kate Murphy, Monica Corish, Maggie Butler, Eilis Coe, Stella Burkin and Margaret O'Brien.  Not present, but with them in spirit, were: Claire O'Reilly, Geraldine Mernagh and Johnney McGuirk.

AWI has led the way in forming its own community to support writers and workshop leaders, create a mission statement to honor the AWA method and organization, and establish a website and develop a newsletter.

This great work serves as an inspiration to all those connected to Amherst Writes & Artists.  AWA is first and foremost a community of writers and workshop leaders.  By building local connections and support, each chapter will strengthen its own work as well as the entire organization.

With glad hearts we applaud your questions and your vision. Slaínte, Ireland! 

 Amherst Writers and Artists completed one of two fall trainings in 2009.
 
   September 9 - 13 was held in Amherst, Massachusetts with trainers
   Maureen Buchanan Jones and Kate Hymes.

   October 30 - November 3 will be in Alamo, California with trainers
   Chris DeLorenzo and Jan Haag.


Amherst Writers & Artists has established a framework to improve communication within the AWA community and beyond.

   The AWA website, www.amherstwriters.com, is the organization's
   primary means of communication with the world.  The website will be
   revised to display the widespread and profound work that AWA
   affiliates undertake.

   The AWA newsletter, delivered via Constant Contact, is the
   organization's way to let affiliates know of upcoming events and
   inform them of developments within AWA.

   The on-line networking forum, Ning, will be the tool with which
   affiliates can communicate their news to each other.  AWA will
   establish this service and invite each affiliate to join and participate.

We invite your responses to these forums and look forward to improving support and services as your needs are voiced.