Writers & Editors Unite!

It's Saturday morning, and I'm excited to attend multiple workshops and networking events today. I just left the Northeast Region morning gathering -- close to a hundred people trying to figure out how to keep the Social Forum process moving forward in our local communities, now that the national event is about to end. I attended about 20 minutes of the Southeast Region discussion before heading off to my own geographic area: it was exciting to hear that some cities have already taken this process and run with it (e.g., Boston).

My highlight yesterday was co-facilitating a workshop on "Writing for Peace and Justice" with Sam Diener, who is the co-editor of PeaceWork magazine, the great nonviolence & social justice publication based out of AFSC's New England office. Sam has a long history of anti-militarism organizing -- he has worked at length with both the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors and the War Resisters League -- and is an experienced speaker and workshop leader, so it was great to partner with him.

We had a full room, about 25-30 people, from about 20 to 80 years of age and including lots of experience in both writing and editing. Folks were looking for inspiration, feedback on their writing, ideas of how to fundraise for their own publications, interests in connecting small progressive publications (like ours) with policy groups or mainstream media, outlets for their work, and much more -- it was a diverse group of needs/desires for the two-hour session. We clearly didn't answer all of those questions, but most participants indicated they enjoyed the session and found it useful.

I'm excited to move into participant mode now, after speaking at both the Writing workshop and the previous day's "Grassroots Civilian Diplomacy" session that FOR sponsored. The hardest part is picking one out of the 1-2 dozen items that I'm interested in during each of today's timeslots!