Featured Guided Autobiography instructor Steve Dolainski, who introduced me to GAB. My own workshops and courses start this spring.

https://birrencenter.substack.com/p/featured-gabber-stephen-dolainski?utm_medium=email

“Stephen Dolainski was drawn to GAB after learning about it through friends in Oregon in 2022.

“I did some research on GAB and, as a long-time adult educator and writer/editor, I was intrigued with the concept and the methodology. I immediately knew that GAB was something for me to explore,” he said.

After taking the the training in November 2022, he wanted to work with LGBTQ seniors.

“When I received certification, I contacted the Los Angeles LGBT Center and proposed forming a GAB class,” he said. “In 2023, we offered three GAB 1 classes and one GAB 2 class. More classes will be offered in 2024.”

Stephen loves teaching GAB and talks about how it how much it benefits writers by sharing their truth.”

CONTINUE READING

If you just keep at it, something new and exciting is always just around the corner. I never imagined I’d be on the board of anything, but here I am, in exceptionally good company. You can see all of the Mystery Writers of America-New York chapter board members at our website.

https://www.mwany.org/board-members-2024/

Narration provided by Wondervox.

By Jim Miller

Dear Savvy Senior,

Does Medicare offer any financial assistance programs to help seniors with their medication costs? I recently enrolled in a Medicare drug plan, but I take some expensive medications that have high out-of-pocket costs and need some help.

Living on a Shoestring 

Dear Living,

Yes, there’s a low-income subsidy program called ‘Extra Help’ that assists Medicare beneficiaries on a tight budget by paying for their monthly premiums, annual deductibles, and co-payments related to their Medicare (Part D) prescription drug coverage.

Jean Ryan has been a friend of mine for quite a few years now. Her writing and her painting always leaving me astonished that so much talent can reside in one person. She painted a commissioned portrait of our beloved cat Peanut when we first welcomed her to our home. Peanut left this world three weeks ago, and Jean’s painting of her hangs by our front door, where she always came running to when we got home.

Check out Jean’s artwork at her website.

Check out her short story collection Lovers and Losers on Amazon here, and her novel Lost Sister here.

And what better accompaniment to her paintings than her marvelous book of nature essays, Strange Company, here and on Audible!

And we’re off! My 2-hour Fiction Writing Essentials online workshop is filling up, and I’m putting together a 2-hour Guided Autobiography Introductory workshop I’ll be offering online and at several in-person locations.

Anyone attending who wants to dive deeper can sign up for the 6-week classes once I have them scheduled (YourWritePath.com). 2024 is turning out to be everything I’d hoped it would. And we have a new cat! James, our first male, and our youngest: 10 months old, a bed cat, an attention seeker, and he gets along great with Wilma (still my baby at 9).

You can now register for classes and workshops with Event Create, including payment! Here’s the link for the upcoming Fiction Essentials workshop.

Narration provided by Wondervox.

By Mark McNease

Gardening is good for the soul as well as the soil. There’s something about planting and watching your vegetables or flowers grow that gives you a feeling of accomplishment.

I’m in the process of renovating our vegetable garden. We have a large back lawn, and when we first moved here permanently from New York City, I wanted to create a real vegetable garden, not the sad attempts we’d made when we were only here on weekends. I ordered three wooden raised bed kits, comprised of six 4×4 rectangles. I then immediately made the mistake of putting two of these adjacent to each other, as 8×4 beds, forming one large 8×8 box. That would be all right, if you never needed to weed or prune or in any other way work within the growing area. I had the sense to put the third long box several feet away, so you could walk between them.

Three years passed. The wood rotted. The soil wasn’t producing very well. And this year I decided to redo the whole thing. The rotted wood has all been pulled out, but the mounds of dirt remain. I’m 65, I don’t shovel snow in the winter, having read stories every year about people my age suffering heart attacks while they shovel their walkways. I’m not interested in dying in my garden, like Vito Corleone in The Godfather. If the dirt had to be moved, it would be by someone else.

Reprinted with permission from Mark S. King’s My Fabulous Disease

The Emotional Triumph of Playwrights Living with HIV

You should know the end of the story first, because the ending demands to be heard. It took place last month in the largest event space at The LGBT Center in New York City, where hundreds of people were excitedly greeting each other, grazing at the food table or sitting in rapturous anticipation for a unique evening of theater.

Over the course of the next two hours, seven pairs of actors would take turns on stage, presenting individual scenes filled with insight, humor, and moments of joyful, sometimes painful truth.

The night was a triumph. There was laughter, emotional silences, nods of recognition and roars of approval. Those roars were only multiplied when, after the final scene, the playwrights who wrote the seven scenes were invited to the stage.

The playwrights were new to this. Some had never before written a theatrical scene. Some had traveled across the country to be there. And each and every one of them was living with HIV. They stood together, holding hands, while the packed audience cheered thunderously. It is a sound that would ring in the grinning playwrights’ ears for days to come.