Articles by Elisavietta Ritchie

Chesapeake Country Poets and Novelists

Washington Writers’ Publishing House wants to give you $1,000

Writers and poets of the greater Bay Weekly area, here is your chance to see your best work as a book. Storm Sandy pushed the venerable Washington Writers’ Publishing House annual deadline to December 1. Fiction writers and poets living within a 75-mile radius of the U.S. Capitol — in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia — thus gain an extra month to prepare manuscripts for entry in two annual book competitions. Some writer-...

Article - Books; by Elisavietta Ritchie; 11/8/12

Stars and Stripes Over Chesapeake Beach

Veterans recount their stories this Memorial Day

Memorial Day Weekend does more than welcome summer with parades, picnics and pool openings. Begun as a sacred day of remembrance at cemeteries where our war dead rest, the holiday has expanded to honor all veterans, including those still on active duty. What better way to honor these veterans than to tell their stories? Stars and Stripes at Chesapeake Beach The Chesapeake Beach inaugural Stars and Stripes Festival, Saturday, May 26 thru Monday, May 28,...

Article - People; by Elisavietta Ritchie; 5/24/12

Christmas Memories

Finding — and giving — refuge from the storm

The deaf cat, a skinny princess getting on, could not hear her own purrs, nor our learned conversations above her head, at a festive gathering in a lovely house on St. Leonard’s Creek beyond Jefferson Patterson Park. Though I demurred, our hosts, Stovy and Anne Brown, pushed the cat (code named Lady Godiva) off her chair so I could sit down. This untoward act of displacement required my offer of lap and a good caressing. For an hour I warmed her elderly feline bones,...

Article - Features; by Elisavietta Ritchie; 12/22/11

Life's Stories

In two new local novels, truth wears the thin disguise of fiction

Captivity, corruption, escapes, flights in truth and fantasy, murder, messages from the dead, revenge, suicide … The stuff of thriller fiction. But in the lives of authors Donald Shomette, Helena Mann-Melnitchenko and Eugene Melnitchenko, such events were terribly real. Wars, internments and such tragedies can be buried in memory, but they’re not forgotten. Writing puts a frame around memories, rendering them more manageable. These authors...

Article - Books; by Elisavietta Ritchie; 9/22/11

Windmills Are Great, But …

Dear Bay Weekly: This debate on the windmills [Pulling Pennies from the Air and The TALL Price of Power, Sept. 30; Correspondence, October 14; Letter from the Editor, October 21] is interesting indeed. A young acquaintance who was going into the business offered to install one at the edge of our wetlands. While spiritually and practically we were all for it, we remembered the constant noise we have heard passing fields of windmills, and we knew we would go nuts with one in our back yard...