On Tuesday, June 5, WordFest will be meeting at the Electric Bean coffee shop, 946 Washington Way (Washington Way and 10th Avenue) in Longview, 6:00 to 8:00 pm.
Mike Strom will be reading several poems, excerpts from his book of short stories, Spice: American Adventures, and also a short segment from his novel Wildwood. Both books are available in Kindle format on amazon.com. Paperback copies of Spice will be available for purchase and signing at the reading.
Mike graduated from RA Long High School in 1966 and Western Washington University in 1994. Following the life of an artist, he picked apples, renovated houses, lived in hippie communes, served in the US Navy, was a commercial fisherman, owned several art galleries and wrote for a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Baltimore Sun, San Diego Union, Longview Daily News, Audubon Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Pacific Fishing, and Fisherman’s News. In 2011, he returned to Longview, where he transformed an old family rental into an “art house” and began producing Pacific NW Artist Series, a series of art interviews conducted by Erica Rodman, presently being aired on KLTV.
Dan Roberts will be reading from his medical thriller, VRSA SYNDROME (At 4:15 on a Friday morning in August, Rick Caldwell takes the phone call every physician dreads. His friend Lindsey Dawson is having a grand mal seizure. In searching for the cause, he learns that Lindsey holds a key he doesn’t want to discover.)
Dan is a retired physician, who moved to Kalama six years ago. He was on the editorial board of Western Journal of Medicine for 10 years, and for several years was on the publication committee for American Academy of Family Physicians, which publishes American Family Physician, a nationally distributed journal of Family Medicine. Over the years, he has had narrative nonfiction pieces published in Medical Economics, and in 2010, a short memoir of his was published in The Healing Muse, a health care related literary journal.
Robin Weitzen will read from a novel she is currently working on, titled My Mission: San Gabriel. Set in California, the story is about a young man torn between a promise to his dead mother and secrets from his family’s past.
Robin has been teaching writing and directing writing programs for more than 20 years at Tulane University, the Institute of Reading Development in Marin County, California, and at the University of Phoenix, where she is currently a faculty member in the colleges of Humanities and Communications. She is in a doctoral studies program at Tulane University, with an emphasis on literary history from 1485 to 1815.
Following the presentations, there will be an open mic period (10 minute limit.)