Mary Jane Essex

Mary Jane Essex is past President of the Marin Branch of CWC: Mary Jane taught English at University of Cincinnati, Xavier University, and Thomas More College, her alma mater. She has retired from teaching to work with developmentally disabled adults and to write. Having grown up in Ohio and lived most of her life in California, Mary Jane feels she has a foot on each side of the country. Sometimes that can be a bit of a stretch.

Her literary models are Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, Agatha Christie, Susan Conant, Susan Wittig Albert, William Shakespeare, Sarah Graves, Geoffrey Chaucer, and David Lodge, not necessarily in that order. She is still working on getting her first book published, but lives in hope.

 

Tanya Egan Gibson

Tanya Egan Gibson lives in Marin County California. How to Buy a Love of Reading is her first novel.

Visit her books' website at: http://www.howtobuyaloveofreading.com

Linda Joy Myers

Linda Joy Myers is a past president of the Marin Branch of CWC: Linda began her writing career beside her great-grandmother Blanche in a feather bed in Iowa. Night after night, when she was eight and Blanche was eighty, she would listen to long tales about the 19th century—pioneers on their way to Kansas in a covered wagon. The great Mississippi River was a rich vein running near the land where the family had migrated from Ohio in 1850, after Iowa was cleared of Indians.

These rooted stories stayed with her, along with a personal yearning to understand why her mother had left her when she was four, and why her grandmother had abandoned her mother. Linda's book Don't Call Me Mother was written over more than a decade, which included many trips to Iowa on the train, and long hours in the Iowa libraries, searching for family facts and truths. The idea was to investigate how the past influences the present, and how we can heal the past through telling the stories that have shaped us.

Linda began her career in the arts first as a cellist and pianist, moving to painting and art in the seventies. Because therapy had helped her with her family trauma, she chose to become a therapist in order to help heal others. Linda began teaching memoir classes six years ago, and has written a book about the healing power of writing: Becoming Whole: Writing Your Healing Story, which was on the Marin best-seller's list. She enjoys gathering with people who love books and writing and stories, and enjoys the camaraderie at the meetings of the Marin branch of CWC.

Linda has two sons and a daughter, a grandson, kitties, and a rose garden. She enjoys friends, family, and traveling, and is working on a novel about the Kindertransport.

 

Cindy Pavlinac

Cindy A. Pavlinac is a writer and photographer specializing in the power of place. She works on location throughout Europe and North America visiting historic sites and prehistoric sanctuaries. Her travel writing and photo essays have appeared in over 600 publications, including Time Magazine’s Pictures of the Year, Martha Stewart TV, Where San Francisco, Forbes Magazine, Spirituality and Health, Family Circle, Delicious, Self, Healthy Living, Glamour, Body Mind Spirit, Site Saver, Environment and Art Letter, Women of Power, Whole Person, Northern California Home and Garden, Marin Magazine, Utne Reader, and as Principal Photographer in the books Labyrinths and Sanctuaries of the Goddess. She wrote a chapter for Earthwalking Sky Dancers: Women's Pilgrimages to Sacred Places and was an editor of Shaman's Drum Magazine and Editor-in-Chief of Artists Dialogue. Her writing awards include Gourmet Magazine for Travel, Maupintour Travel International, KINSA Kodak Journalism, Maynard Owen Williams (National Geographic Founder) Award, P.O.W. (Power of Women Writers), and Young Writers Conference Cranbrook, Michigan with Joyce Carol Oates.

Cindy earned a Masters Degree in Arts and Consciousness Studies focusing on the use of art and story for healing in ancient cultures, and a B.A. in Photography, minoring in astrophysics, with foreign study in Athens and Rome in archaeology. She has been visiting special places ever since Apollo hollered at her in Delphi, Greece in 1977, striving to bridge the ancient with the modern and to inspire people through images, words, music, and performance.

Cindy lives in Marin Country, California with her collaborators, musician husband, Martin Gregory and their magical pup, Merlin. She has a studio in San Rafael and creates site specific interactive installations with storytelling and imagery for labyrinth walk events and overnight Dream Quests, projecting hundreds of photos onto 50 foot hanging silk veils. Cindy is chauffeur and typist for Merlin's Road Trip blog and maintains a website at CAPavlinac.com

Priscilla Royal

Priscilla Royal is a charter member of the Marin Branch of CWC: After retiring from government work, Priscilla entered a life of crime when she decided that time travel to 13th century England might be more fun and much cheaper than buying an RV. She was right about the "fun", but seven bookcases on medieval history later, she agrees that "cheaper" may have been wrong. Her sleuths, Prioress Eleanor and Brother Thomas, belong to a real Order of Fontevraud in which monks and nuns lived and worked together in close proximity. Their leader, however, was always a woman, an interesting concept in a world that believed women were weak and should never rule men. Her first books in the series, Wine of Violence and Tyrant of the Mind, are published by Poisoned Pen Press. In the spring of 2006, Alyson Press will publish her contemporary cozy, Favas Can Be Fatal.

 

Barbara Truax

Barbara Truax is a founding member of Marin branch and past president of the state-wide California Writers Club. During her state presidency, the California Writers Club accepted a California Legislative Resolution, declaring the third week of October as California Writers Week.

A native of Wisconsin, she and her husband Don "came across the Rockies and never looked back" in 1974. She worked in the medical field for 24 years, signed up for a romance writing class at the local community college "for fun" and a writer was born. Four unpublished novels later, bemoaning her fate, her writing teacher said, "You’re a writer—you can write anything!" Barbara has published short stories and articles and now, after a three year hiatus, has returned to writing. Her latest project is the history of the Carnegie libraries in the United States. She credits her seventh grade teacher Sister Emily for her ability to still diagram sentences. Bad writing, typos, and grammatical errors drive her crazy.

Jett Walker

Jett Walker is Secretary of the Marin Branch of CWC: Jett was raised in Long Beach California. After college she taught school in Long Beach and Compton. She has lived in Italy, Delaware, Washington D.C. area, and Aspen, Colorado before settling in Tiburon 33 years ago. Once in the Bay area she attended the Academy of Art. She did a lot of writing in college at Long Beach but turned her creative endeavors to art working in paint, etchings, and sculpture. She is a past president of Marin Society of Artists. For all of her life she has kept journals and is an avid reader. Ten years ago she started her first novel. It has been edited and reedited umpteen times. It awaits its finished draft. In the meantime she has just completed her second novel's first draft. She loves words and is fairly fluent in Italian and Spanish, having studied in Spain, Peru, Mexico, and Costa Rica.