Now at Looking Glass Bookstore, 7983 SE 13^th Avenue in the Sellwood neighborhood 

Karin Anna, Looking Glass Bookstore owner, welcomes the group with refreshments, a good stack of the author's books and a comfortable setup. She opens the store—normally closed on Mondays—the 4^th Monday evening of each month, to welcome OWC members and the general public to this continuing series of writers reading and talking about different aspects of the writing craft. Organizers of OWC Presents! are excited about the move to Looking Glass Bookstore.  The reading space is bright and ample, complete with a glass wall that faces onto a garden.  (The little red caboose entry to the store belies the spacious rooms beyond.)  And, Karin Anna and her staff are warm and eager to welcome one and all.  Handicapped access is behind the store.

OWC Presents! is a series of FREE workshops for or about writers and writing. Workshops are held the 4th Monday of each month at Looking Glass Bookstore, 7983 SE 13th Ave., Portland (in the Sellwood neighborhood) 

7:00 p.m.

Here's what's coming in 2009

January 25

Carolyn Rose and Mike Nettleton will discuss the intricacies of the use of multiple points of view.  Their most recent release is The Big Grabowski, the 2^nd in the Paladin mystery series.

Mike Nettleton is an Oregon native-turned radio gypsy who found his way back home in the late Eighties. Settled into a ten-year gig with1190 KEX radio in Portland, Mike has co-written four novels with his wife Carolyn J. Rose. Although they've threatened, friends have yet to instigate a marital intervention. His short stories have won two PNW blue ribbons and their jointly written fantasy, The Hermit of Humbug Mountain, was a Rocky Mountain Gold finalist. Other interests include golf, tennis, avoiding yard work, hold-em poker and book collecting. He has a 31 year old son, Robert from a first marriage.

Carolyn J. Rose developed her interest in homicide and whodunit during the 24 years she tracked news stories for TV stations in Little Rock, Arkansas, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Eugene, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. More recently, she jumped into the educational trenches as a substitute teacher. She and Mike teach a Novel-Writing Boot Camp at Clark Community College in Vancouver. Their biggest challenges have been house-breaking Bubba the ten-pound wonder dog, and learning how to write together without contemplating divorce more than once a day.

February 22

Bibi Gaston, author of The Loveliest Woman in America.

In 1927, at the age of twenty-three, Rosamond Pinchot was hailed as "The Loveliest Woman in America." At thirty-three, in a sudden, shocking, and highly public act, Rosamond took her own life, setting in motion generations of confusion in the family she left behind.

Nearly seventy years after her demise, her granddaughter Bibi received a box of more than 1,500 pages of Rosamond's diaries and embarked on a seven-year journey to make sense of the silence that surrounded Rosamond's death and to discover the grandmother she never knew. An acclaimed beauty, actress, socialite, and outdoors woman, Rosamond became the key to Bibi's understanding of her enigmatic and adventurous father, her glamorous but painfully divided family, and herself.

Through the silent labyrinth of a brilliant but troubled family, Bibi pieced together Rosamond's life story—her magical embrace of nature, her love for two compelling but difficult men, and her circle of "on tops," intimates, and mentors, including Elizabeth Arden, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Cukor, and David O. Selznick. Bibi also discovered the tragic legacy of the women in her family, including Rosamond's cousin Edie Sedgwick and her half sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer, whose murder in 1964 has never been solved.

Bibi Gaston has been a practicing landscape architect for twenty years. She divides her time between New York City and the Columbia River Gorge, where, like her grandmother, she is learning to fish and tie her own flies. She has kept a diary since the age of eight.