When It Comes to Memories, Everyone’s a Writer
Eighty degrees on April 4! With sweat on our brows, women in sleeveless dresses and men in shorts, summer insinuated itself into early spring — and into our hearts and minds.
Midafternoon, editorial production stopped on this week’s issue. (Only the next day’s cold snap brought us back to the here and now and this paper into your hands.) We fast-forwarded in time to Memorial Day’s issue six weeks hence. Two whole months away, the calendar says. But editorial calendars exist in a different stretch of time.
In that temporal universe, six weeks is so short its deadlines keep editors up at night.
Worse, the issue of Memorial Day takes an S. It’s issueS, for in that paper comes our annual Guide to Summer on the Chesapeake, 101 Ways to Have Fun.
Send Your Chesapeake Summer Memories
That special edition is on top of — really inside — our regular edition. Inspired by readers, we’re asking you to make that issue yours.
For the last few weeks, we’ve run an entreaty in 8 Days a Week, asking you to share your fondest memories of how, once upon a time in a golden age, you gave yourself to the long hours of Bay pleasures with which the three rare months of summer reward us.
April 4’s taste of summer was the push you needed from intent to action. Memories are now pouring in.
But we are greedy and want more.
Right now! Write now! This window of opportunity closes at month’s end, and you know how fast time flies: [email protected].
Add 1 or 2 to Our 101 Ways to Have Fun
While you’re at it, you could send me your ideas for your favorite ways to have fun in contemporary Chesapeake summers. In 18 years of annually reinventing 101 pleasures, we may have missed one or two — perhaps even your favorite. Please set us straight and fill out our list. I eagerly await receipt of your suggested ways to get out and into the wonders of our place, our time. Either offer the topic, or write up your ways in brief essays (200 or so words) explaining what and how and where and why — and with what special equipment. Ideally, you’ll send a couple of photos, as well.
Everybody’s a Writer
I need your help, as my desk has disappeared under the new books by Bay Weekly contributors and story subjects. Poetry? Janice Lynch Schuster, Elisavietta Ritchie and Grace Cavalieri. Autobiography? Helena and Eugene Melnitchenko. Mystery? Donald Shomette, author of a dozen scholarly books of regional history. Adventure? Steve Carr. Reflection? Elizabeth Ayres, whose book Invitation to Wonder is reviewed in this week’s paper.
The names are familiar because in these pages you’ve read stories by and about them.
The moral? Bay Weekly nourishes writers. Why not you?
Carr’s Writing Triumph
I can’t wait any longer to share news of another writing triumph. Bay Weekly columnist Steve Carr has won the Jansson Prize for Environment Writing, awarded by the Potomac River Association. His 5,000-word essay, Fear the Turtle, on the relationship between property rights and Maryland’s critical areas regulations, is too big to appear in these pages, but we promise you an abridged version.
Victoria Ronan, a Woman Empowering Women
Bay Weekly Advertising Account Executive Victoria Ronan gives us cause to celebrate a triumph of another kind. She is the Calvert County Chamber of Commerce’s 2011 Woman Empowering Women for her range of service to women’s causes … as an Arbonne International distributor, generously donating the company’s environmentally responsible products to the American Cancer Society’s Look Better, Feel Better program; to women in shelter; and to no end of community fundraisers … as cochair of the Chamber’s Women to Women Network … and as Plum Point Elementary School’s room mom, team mom and the PTA’s secretary.