Jesup Memorial Library's Write On! group has been meeting, in person and remotely, on Saturday mornings since 2014. Attendees share group leadership, bringing manuscripts of fiction, memoir, poetry, and just about anything else for individualized feedback, and in turn offering feedback for others. Join them to hear more about their work and find out how to become a member.
Read on to find out more about the writers!
Carol Woolman published her first story about a rafting trip in the Arctic that changed her life. In 2013 she self-published a book for the Library of Congress Veterans History Project about her father that is both a family history and a WWII memoir. Her current work, Ecology of Grief, A Mother’s Witness, is about living through the violent death of her 25-year-old son Mark Horner. It includes the penetrating and numbing sorrow but also adventure, surprise, mystery and meaning. She feels a sense of urgency to find a publisher for this book.
Steven Roiphe holds a nonrefundable degree from Harvard. His prose has appeared in a number of literary magazines, garnering a Pushcart Prize nomination. He lives with his wife and young son in Lamoine, where he has recently finished writing a novel that follows a rogue deity’s quest to spark justice down through American history; now he’s searching for a book agent to help take his work to the next level.
Andrew McQuinn got his degree in video production from the New England School of Communications. After graduating he spent six years in Las Vegas, working as a stagehand. He now resides in Bangor where he works as an Ed Tech at a preschool for special needs kids. When he’s not writing, Andrew is spending time with his feline fur baby Marty, Sir Martin if he’s feeling extra dignified. Andrew has several novels in the works he hopes to get published over the next year or two. Playing it out Straight is his debut novel.
Dona Parker, an arts major with a graduate degree in counseling, has followed her passions throughout her life through painting, sculpting, writing, and other creative pursuits. In Atlanta, she created a class on The Artist Way by Julie Cameron, encouraging others to bring to life their own creativity. She moved to Maine for the second time in 2009 with her husband, and is now working on a book of poems that began to flow after her husband’s death six years ago. The poems and grief essays have provided a way into her own grief and healing process. She has also written several “practice” novels and continues to write memoir stories and essays.
Before children, Joan FitzGerald was an award-winning financial news reporter. Since children, she has written short stories and essays, and a middle grade, environmental fantasy. She is currently at work on an adult dystopian novel. Joan lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has been a summer resident of Mt. Desert Island since birth. The Jesup Writers group has been an essential support for her work. She writes all year ’round but writes best here, on this island in Maine.