hub during therailroad boom from the mid-1850s to the turn-of-the-century. with the help of our charter communications partners over the next hour we will travel the city and talk with local authors about their work including the stories of a california game warden . >> i work in a case for over a year involving that. there was a bald eagle that was an endangered species and was shot and left at the front gate and the commission game officer in redding. there was a note attached to the eagle threatening the life of one of the wardens that was my supervisor at the time. >> later we go inside the shasta public library view selected items about the area from their special collections. but first, we learn about the redding writers forum and the impact it had on the literary community in california. >> so we're thinking more this week about how to get our writing done in turbulent times and remember those of you are disenfranchised, that into your writing and flesh out your characters a little bit more. >> continue to write as though you're going to get

beyond the turbulent times. >> i am joined by sharon owens from the writing department. >> welcome to our meeting and thank you so much for thinking of us and coming to join us today. we are honored to have you here. >> first let's start off with what is the writers forum? >> the writers forum is an organization that had early beginning in the early 80s when we discovered that we had several people in our community who were interested in writing and who wanted to meet and network with like-minded folks. we eventually became a larger organization and more formal and when we decided we needed a mission statement, what we decided was that our mission is to promote the craft of writing as an art and as a profession and we felt that

covered all the needs our community would have and we have a far-reaching community, we go beyond redding and beyond shasta county. we have people who come from as far away as even southern oregon,sacramento and to the east and west in the foothills in some of the mountain communities . >> how did you get involved in what's your role? >> were going back to so many years ago that i can't believe i'm old enough to tell you the whole story but i've always for years and years i've been interested in writing. i wasn't sure what sort of writing so i took some news writing and reporting courses at our local college and went on to take photojournalism classes and then when we ran out of courses in writing in the area, i started looking for groups and i saw an ad for a critique group, joined

that group run by a lovely woman was here in town for a few years, her husband was finishing a medical internship at one of our hospitals. when we realized we had avril people doing tentatively with eachother, we brought those groups together into one organization . and that was how it began in the early 80s. and it grew and developed from their and has thrived and remained a vibrant organization including the 501(c)(3) that we were granted in the early 90s. and my role, most of the time when i've been on the board i've been the program director. in the early years, so far back that i barely remember until i see my plaque on my wall that i was the president at one time but i really enjoyed the program director position and have been doing that now again for several years. i was out of estate in the

early 90s going back to finish getting my degree at the university in connecticut. but once i came back home and got back involved, i got back into the program director role at camp. >> to follow up on that, what are your responsibilities ? >> primarily to ensure that we have a presenter for each of our eight programs that we put on for our groups, we have monthly meetings and eight times a year we tried to present a program that is both educational and somewhat entertaining and we try to keep a broad variety of topics so that no matter what our membersinterests are , they have an opportunity to gain knowledge and skills in whatever field that they are writing interests lie.

>> how do you decide on what you guys read about or talk about during the times you guys meet? >> we have a board made up of 10 members and as program director i have always asked my board to give me suggestions or ideas and we discussed those at our board meeting and we run back at our schedule to see when was the last time our talk was on poetry, when did we last discussed fiction, short stories, how to write the essay. even things like maybe near tax time we bring in a tax expert or someone who can talk about other legal aspects of writing. what is liable, how do you avoid copyright infringement, that sort of thing so we just try to paint with the broadest possible brush so that we don't miss any topics that might be of value to our members.

and the board is very helpful with that. recently we sent out a survey to all our members and we put in the survey every possible topic, the category that we could think of and we asked them to evaluate and number this in order of their interests 1 to 10 what you would most like to see at our meetings and the resultof that is the program schedule we have this year and coming up next month , we have the craft, we have elements of fiction and after that the craft of writing a memoir. and following up with that we have a presentation on writing biography. so we just keep it as broad as possible so that we touch on any potential writing interests. >> what has been the response from the community? >> we feel a great response. we get good media coverage for every one of our meetings and we have something special going on, we get even special

media coverage that way. we tried when we can to include the community and our activities. one reason we've done the authors here is that that pulls in a lot of people who are not members and who don't attend our general meetings but that has been an opportunity to come and put their books out and meet with people and have an opportunity to let people know what they are doing. we've years ago we did something that i really enjoy because as you may remember from a previous conversation about acting in theater, we have a very vibrant active theater community that started out about the same time that we did there's some back-and-forth and one of our speakers today is involved in that. >> research, don't let them get you. how many times have you

registered things, watching on television or inthe movies . >> she and i did a talk several months ago about writing for the live stage so that potential community members who may not be regular members that have something they want to know about so what we tried to do is enough publicity about our programs so anyone in the community that may not be a regular member may have an opportunity to come in and hear something useful to them too. >> what does this mean to have a writers forum, like there's that you help direct, what does it mean to direct writers forum? >> i think it means a lot to writing. we done scholarship funds for high school students, for several years. we've been funding $250 and $500 scholarships depending

on how our treasury is looking and we've done that every year so we've inspired a lot of young people to every school in our entire writing community, we open them the opportunity to write and to submit work and be eligible for scholarships. and we also, we try our best to let any writer know, any writer who can make it to our meetings to know that we're out here because the opportunities for networking. and what we've done to is one of the things that i'm really proud of is that we have a lot of writers who want to be published. so when we are able to work out the details that we need to in terms of location and time and money, we've been able to bring top level literary agents to come for

an entire day and do a special workshop just so that the people who want to know more about the business and how the business actually works and how they may get published. here are some of the experts and we tried to do that too as often as were able because there are many people, many talented people who, they just need to know more about the business and how to go about it. >> what are the plans for the future for the writers forum. >> we just want to keep doing what we're doing as well as we can. our membership give and we are always looking for younger and younger members because many people these days because of their work, because of school, because of other commitments don't have the time to write that some of our older members have now retired but what we are actively doing is hoping to

include more and more young people in our organization so that they can get that writing has starts and not have to wait until retirement before they take it on. >>. >> i want to say thank you to sharon olds for inviting us here at your meeting. >> thank you, we are thrilled to have you. >> we are standing on sun outward, one of redding's main attractions. where thousands of visitors every year, continuing our coverage with literary culture, we speak with offer author steven callan about his time as a game warden in the state of california. >> i grew up as the son of the game warden so my teenage years i spent a lot of time writing on patrol of my dad so i had the great adventures working with him as well so that's where the name of the book came from area and later on i became a fish and game warden myself