Scratchpad Reading Series

Curated by Amanda Pleau.

Deirdre Fulton lives on Munjoy Hill. She is the staff writer for the Portland Phoenix and a founding member of Lorem Ipsum, a local theater collective (Ubu Roi, Blood Wedding, and the upcoming Threepenny Opera). Under the pen name Elizabeth Miles, she is writing a young-adult paranormal trilogy about New England teenagers who find themselves entangled with mysterious goddesses of revenge. The first installment, Fury, will be released by Simon & Schuster later this month.

Sean Wilkinson is a principal of a design firm and goes to a lot of important meetings. He holds a BFA from Maine College of Art and is a founder of PICNIC Music and Arts Festival. His dad being an English professor and frustrated writer, literary dreams have always been encouraged and forced upon him. He won the Brewer Young Author’s Award in 1985 and wore a clip-on tie to the event. He has written one-point-five terrible novels as part of National Novel Writing Month and one of them is about working on a boat. He lives in Parkside with his girlfriend (also a designer) where the Seadogs fireworks light up his backyard, which gives a real Oliver Stone feel to late night parties on hot summer nights.

Andrew Lapham Fersch is a teacher first and a writer second. His first collection of children’s poetry is coming out Winter 2011 and one copy of the book will be donated to every elementary school in Maine. His poetry can be found at; www.AndrewFersch.com. He directs an after school education center, cooks a lot, enjoys yoga, and wishes everyone listened to the Avett Brothers.

Sean Moore lives in Portland. He has self-published an anthology poetry and short stories, and is sitting on an (unpublished) novel. There are many unfinished projects cluttering his mind and desk. During the week he can be found in a classroom teaching kindergarten in Old Orchard Beach.

Kevin St. Jarre lives in Maine. He served in the military and worked in the corporate world. His teaching and consulting have taken him around the globe. His first three novels were published by Berkley Books and he has recently completed another novel titled, “Deeds of Men.” He is working on a new novel and a screenplay. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast MFA program.

E.J. Fechenda is an aspiring author who has been published in Suspense Magazine and will be published in a yet to be titled anthology in January 2011. She has completed one novel (which is desperately seeking editing) and has three other novels in progress, plus a growing collection of short stories. E.J. is a current member of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She lives in Portland with her husband, stepson and a couple of four-legged critters who think they’re human.

Marie Coyle lives & writes in Portland. She has written a short story collection, “Other Women,” and been published in Amarillo Bay Literary Magazine. Her short play “Class” won the People’s Choice Award at the 2011 Maine Playwright’s Festival and she is currently working on a novel & a full-length play.

Nick Pappas has worked in information technology for that last 15 years and is still not sure what that means. He has a BA in Psychology/Sociology from the University of Mass (Lowell) and an MBA from Clark University. He writes fiction, poetry and lyrics, plays the guitar and piano and enjoys a beer or eleven on occasion.

Tuesday, February 15th, 7:00pm
Mama’s CrowBar, 189 Congress St., Portland ME (map)
FREE – bar is cash only/beer only/21+

FEATURING THE CAPTIVATING, AGILE AND ELOQUENT
STAFF OF THE TELLING ROOM
(that’s the place where stories grow)

Heather Davis
Heather came to Portland via Austin, TX, where she co-founded a youth writing center called Austin Bat Cave and served as the senior grant writer for a nonprofit, arts education organization. These days she’s the Telling Room’s development director. Heather holds a BA from St. John’s College, and an MA from Goddard College, where she designed an individualized program that combined coursework on youth development, arts education, and creative writing with her experiences as a writing teacher in Harlem.

Patty Hagge
A graduate of USM’s Stonecoast MFA program, Patty is The Telling Room’s den mother, Lead Teacher for workshops and special projects and a member of the board. She worked as a poet in the Brunswick school system and currently serves on the board at SPACE Gallery.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc
Gibson’s poems, interviews, and reviews have appeared in magazines including Boston Review, Guernica, The New Republic, Time Out: New York, Tin House, and Verse Daily. With graduate degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, he has taught writing and literature in public and private middle schools, high schools, and colleges in California, Vermont, New York, and Maine, and is the Telling Room’s executive director.

Andrew Griswold
Andrew has taught and mentored middle and high school students in Maine, California, and Washington, DC, since graduating from Davidson College. He holds an MA from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English and is The Telling Room’s education and web coordinator. When he’s not writing, coordinating and mentoring, he’s probably listening to music, skiing or spending time with his wife, young son and their labradoodle Hazel.

Tuesday, November 16th, 7:00pm
Mama’s CrowBar, 189 Congress St., Portland ME (map)
FREE – bar is cash only/beer only/21+

FEATURING THE SPARKLING, BRILLIANT AND SHINY

Sybil Wilen
Sybil’s short stories and articles have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Solstice Literary Journal, Dark Sky, Pen Noir,  Words & Images, Llewellyn Worldwide’s Magical Almanacs, The Witches Calendar, The Casco Bay/Maine Weekly and other publications. She is working on a collection of short shorts inspired by the titles of various Kama Sutra positions—only the titles.

Rob Korobkin
Rob spends most days programming software and websites in a sunny room with fake hardwood floors above Bill’s Pizza on Commercial Street. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, a town with “real” bagels, well-fertilized lawns and a plenitude of Priuses. If he could travel in time, Rob would teleport to the early 1970s and spend a weekend drinking whiskey with Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver somewhere on the coast of California. He has lived in Portland for about two years.

Brandi Neal
Brandi is currently enrolled in the Creative Non-Fiction program at The University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast. Originally from Toledo, she moved to Maine in 2003 to attend the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. Upon graduation she worked as a local journalist and newspaper editor in southern Maine and freelanced for a number of local and national publications including Teaching Tolerance Magazine, Portland Magazine and MovieMaker Magazine. Along with fellow Salt graduates Brandi co-founded Portland’s first documentary arts magazine The Blue Room. She serves on the editorial board as a fiction editor for the inaugural issue of The New Guard Review and is co-editor of Stonecoast’s literary review Coastlines. To pay the bills Brandi works as a copywriter at L.L.Bean. She lives on Munjoy Hill with her photographer husband Tim and their four pets.

Abraham A. Schechter
While at a monastery in the Green Mountains in 1994, Abraham began journal-writing, and  continues to this day. Raised in New York City and Paris, he worked for 14 years as a  photographer, printing portfolios for Aperture, National Geographic and Magnum, also publishing his own work and teaching photography at Maine College of Art. For the past ten years, he’s been working full-time as an archivist and bookbinder. His writing has been published in Sacred Journey (Princeton), the typewritten periodical Silent Type, various archival publications, and a textbook on the conservation of books. He has been writing and illustrating La Vie Graphite, a blogging extension of his journal, comprising travels and thoughts since 2006. His blog has won several writing awards.

Shanna Miller McNair
Shanna writes stories, poems, plays and screenplays and comes from a background in journalism and visual arts. Most recently her poetry appeared in Naugatuck River Review and Fact-Simile. She was a finalist in the Summer Literary Seminars 2010 Contest for both fiction and poetry. McNair is the founder of the forthcoming literary journal The New Guard Review. She is an MFA candidate at Stonecoast and lives in Knightville, Maine.