Annette's Wandering's One Year Substack Anniversary Celebration!

Come celebrate with me! One year ago, I started a new writing journey by posting sixty-five stories over the course of several months about women I call Accidental Mentors, women who have impacted my life in significant ways.  I’ve published a total of 150 posts this year, including my latest serialized memoir project, If You Only Knew: A Memoir of Family Secrets and Their Undoing. It’s been quite a year, and I’m very proud of this accomplishment.

To celebrate this momentous occasion, I’ve invited four of my favorite writers, Robin Farmer, Meg Kearney, Anne-Marie Oomen, and Kassie Rubico, to celebrate with me. They’ll each read from their work, and we’ll discuss the role of personal writing from their varied perspectives, including fiction, poetry, young adult fiction, essay, and memoir.

May 24, 2024

7:00-9:00 pm Eastern (6:00 pm Central, 5:00 pm Mountain, 4:00 pm Pacific)

Guest Speakers

Robin Farmer

Robin Farmer is an award-winning author, screenwriter and journalist. She specializes in strong female protagonists interested in identity, truth-telling and service to others. Her Catholic upbringing in Philadelphia generated guilt and stories, including her debut YA novel Malcolm and Me (2020), adapted from her own screenplay. Writer/director of two shorts, Robin was recently awarded the 2023 Stowe Story Labs Bellem Entertainment Fellowship and a Hedgebrook Residency. Director of the Virginia Screenwriters Forum, she is writing a pilot and another novel.

Meg Kearney

In spring 2021, The Word Works Press published Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry, which made Small Press Distribution’s poetry bestseller list April through September 2021, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was awarded the Silver Medal in Foreword Review’s Indies Book Award for Poetry. Meg is also author of The Ice Storm, a heroic crown (Green Linen Press Chapbook Series, 2020), currently in its third printing. Her collection of poems Home By Now (Four Way Books) was selected by Tim Seibles for the 2010 PEN New England LL Winship Award; it was also a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year. 

Meg is also author An Unkindness of Ravens (BOA Editions Ltd., 2001) and a trilogy of verse novels for teens: The Secret of Me (2005); The Girl in the Mirror (2012); and When You Never Said Goodbye (2017), all from Persea Books. Meg’s picture book, Trouper (Scholastic, 2013) is illustrated by E.B. Lewis and won many accolades, including the 2015 Kentucky Bluegrass Award and the Missouri Association of School Librarians’ Show Me Readers Award. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey chose Meg’s poem “Grackle” for the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology.

Meg’s poetry has also been featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac,” and has been published in myriad anthologies and literary journals. Meg is Founding Director of the Solstice Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Lasell University in Newton, Massachusetts. Prior to launching the Solstice Program, she was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation (sponsor of the National Book Awards) in New York City. She also taught poetry at the New School University. A native New Yorker, Meg currently resides in New Hampshire.

Anne-Marie Oomen

Anne-Marie Oomen’s memoir, As Long As I Know You: The Mom Book, won AWP’s Nonfiction Award, Michigan’s Notable Book Award, and a silver IPPY. She co-authored Lake Michigan Mermaid with Linda Nemec Foster (Michigan Notable Book), Love, Sex and 4-H (Next Generation Indie Award), and edited ELEMENTAL: A Collection of Michigan Nonfiction.  She teaches at Solstice MFA at Lasell University (MA), Interlochen’s College of Creative Arts (MI) and lives near Traverse City, Michigan. Her newest, The Long Fields, is now out. In 2023, Anne-Marie was named the recipient of the 2023-2024 Michigan Author Award by the Library of Michigan.

Kassie Rubico

Kassie Rubico’s work has appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul, Guide to Kulcher Creative Journal, Insight Academic Journal, Parnassus Literary Journal, the anthology, River Muse, Tales of Lowell and the Merrimack Valley, and Toska Literary Magazine. She received a Master of Arts in Creative Writing and Literature at Rivier College and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Pine Manor College. She has taught writing and literature at various colleges and is currently teaching in the Changing Lives Through Literature program. Kassie lives in Cambridge, MA.

I hope you’ll join us!