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THE WICA/HEDGEBROOK LITERARY SERIES.

Whidbey Island Center for the Arts and the Hedgebrook retreat for women writers have partnered to create a program that brings together writers and book-lovers. The Literary Series offers intimate conversations with bestselling Hedgebrook authors and a chance to see local artists bring excerpts of the authors’ works to life in short, staged readings.



“An Evening with Winnie Holzman”

Winnie Holzman is an American dramatist, screenwriter and poet. She created the ABC television series "My So-Called Life," which earned her an Emmy Award nomination for writing in 1995. She also wrote for "thirtysomething" and "Once and Again." Winnie will be showing clips of these shows on Tuesday. Throughout the evening Winnie will be in conversation with Hedgebrook Executive Director Amy Wheeler about her work and writing. At the end of the eveing she will open up the conversation for comments & questions from the audience. Join us for a fascinating evening from this talented and unique writer.

Holzman studied English and Creative Writing at Princeton University and graduated with a Masters in Musical Theatre Writing from New York University in 1984. Her teachers at NYU included Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince, Arthur Laurents, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Leonard Bernstein.

Holzman made her Broadway debut in 2003 when she wrote the book for the Stephen Schwartz musical "Wicked," based on the novel of the same name by Gregory Maguire. She won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical.

Holzman has had a number of acting spots, primarily cameo roles on her own TV shows and a role as a therapist on "Curb Your Enthusiasm." She also had a small role in the film "Jerry Maguire."

Holzman is married to actor Paul Dooley, with whom she has one daughter, Savannah Dooley (born 1985), who is also a writer, and with whom Winnie has collaborated on various short films. Holzman and her daughter penned a TV pilot based on the Sasha Paley novel "Huge," which ABC Family greenlit in January 2010 with a direct-to-series order. "Huge" premiered in late June 2010. The series was cancelled on October 4, 2010 due to low ratings compared with the network's other summer hits.

Mar 27, 2012 @7.30pm

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“An Evening with Claire Dederer”

Ten years ago, Claire Dederer put her back out while breastfeeding her baby daughter. Told to try yoga by everyone from the woman behind the counter at the co-op to the homeless guy on the corner, she signed up for her first class. She fell madly in love.

Over the next decade, she would tackle triangle, wheel, and the dreaded crow, becoming fast friends with some poses and developing long-standing feuds with others. At the same time, she found herself confronting the forces that shaped her generation. Daughters of women who ran away to find themselves and made a few messes along the way, Dederer and her peers grew up determined to be good, good, good—even if this meant feeling hemmed in by the smugness of their organic-buying, attachment-parenting, anxiously conscientious little world. Yoga seemed to fit right into this virtuous program, but to her surprise, Dederer found that the deeper she went into the poses, the more they tested her most basic ideas of what makes a good mother, daughter, friend, wife—and the more they made her want something a little less tidy, a little more improvisational. Less goodness, more joy.

Claire's book, "Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses," is unlike any other book about yoga you will read -- because it is actually a book about life. Witty and heartfelt, sharp and irreverent, Poser is for anyone who has ever tried to stand on their head while keeping both feet on the ground.

Ms. Dederer is a longtime contributor to The New York Times. Her articles have appeared in Vogue, Real Simple, The Nation, New York, Yoga Journal, on Slate and Salon, and in newspapers across the country. Her writing has encompassed criticism, reporting, and the personal essay.

Before becoming a freelance journalist, she was the chief film critic at Seattle Weekly.

Learn more about this proud fourth-generation Seattle native on her website.

Jan 25, 2012 @7.30pm

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“An Evening with Monique Truong”

Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1968, Monique Truong is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), is the inaugural selection of the Ladies’ Home Journal Book Club. The novel received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a 25 Best Fiction Books of 2010 by Barnes & Noble, a 10 Best Fiction Books of 2010 by Hudson Booksellers, and the adult fiction Honor Book by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association. Her first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller and the recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Award, an Association for Asian American Studies Poetry/Prose Award, and a Seventh Annual Asian American Literary Award. In 2003, The Book of Salt was honored as a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, a Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction Book, one of the Village Voice‘s 25 Favorite Books, and one of the Miami Herald‘s Top 10 Books, among other citations. Learn more about Ms. Truong on her website.


About Bitter in the Mouth (from Publishers Weekly):

"Linda Hammerick has a special yet burdensome gift--she experiences words as tastes. Linda's boyfriends' names, for example, remind her of orange sherbet and parsnips; her own name is mint-flavored. Depending on the speaker, listening, for Linda, can be delicious or distasteful. In the first part of the book, Linda interacts with her family: she dances with her eccentric uncle Baby Harper, whose sing-song voice limits her 'tasting his words'; she faced off with her acerbic grandmother, Iris; deals with her adored father, Thomas, and her unsympathetic mother, Deanne, whose infatuation with a neighborhood boy leaves Linda vulnerable to his predatory advances. Woven into Linda's story is the history of her home state, North Carolina--slaveholding days, the first airplane flight, and local Indian lore. But when a sudden tragedy brings Linda back home from New York City, she finds answers to a life that has been made up of half-finished sentences, as the secret of her origins and the clandestine histories of those around her are revealed one by one. Truong's (Book of Salt) mesmerizing prose beautifully captures Linda's taste-saturated world, and her portrait of a broken family's secretive pockets and genuine moments of connection is affecting."

Oct 26, 2011 @7.30pm

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