Word Smitten - About Us - Masthead and the who, what and why.

WordSmitten
A Southern
haven for beach bums.
Where the writing is crisp, the towels are wet
and the wit is dry.

Started by a group of journalists and authors undergoing media-withdrawal symptoms in 1999,
WordSmitten provides some snappy patter and exclusive interviews for the book publishing industry. We cover the people, the books, and the business of writing.

We're in a business that changes. The online world grows and we hope to grow with it. We now have a radio broadcast of WordSmitten, giving a voice to regional, national, and international authors, editors, and publishing executives. Our WordSmitten Writing Workshops are exciting for us because they are so popular each one is a sold-out event.
Initial missions change, companies find new directions, and in 2007, our WordSmitten group of companies (Native Shore Fiction, The Storycove, and our WSM OnAir) faces today's economic issues with great optimism. We have ideas for the future in spite of and perhaps because of the dot-com watershed, the world in turmoil, and the uncertain times. But, we do believe in stories. We believe in the written word. We are WordSmitten.

Current projects for the company include searching for notable book publishing individuals to interview, creating a new fiction department to showcase new authors (Native Shore Fiction: because everyone is familiar with their own native shore), two fiction competitions, and continuing reports on writing conferences for writers who strive to continually enhance their professional careers.

For more than thirty years,
Bill Loewenstein has been a professional writer and writing teacher living both on the mainland and in the South Pacific. He has a bachelor's in journalism from Michigan State University and a master's in communication from Western Michigan University. He has written for and edited weekly and daily newspapers in the Pacific, served as a foreign correspondent for magazines and newspapers, traveled widely throughout Asia and Indochina, and advised government and non-profit agencies in the United States. He currently teaches both fiction and non-fiction writing at Baker College and Michigan State University. During the years he lived in the South Pacific he published a widely read island newspaper, and although he now lives on the mainland, Word Smitten's team delights in providing Bill with his own private cyber island within our editorial pages. As soon as he could, Bill Loewenstein left the daily grind of running a newspaper, moved from the islands and found teaching journalism to college students more interesting than standing watch for a Pacific Ocean tsunami. He moved from Hawaii to Michigan in the late 1980s and each winter visits Florida where he writes short stories.

Kate comments, "I take Bill with me to my writing group when he's here on a visit. He then spends the next two days cataloguing our discussions, some rancorous and some unorthodox, politely guised as critiques of short stories. He's not to be trusted which is why I like him. I prefer having friends
who need to be watched."

A novelist and editor,
Shelley Singer lives in Northern California where she teaches creative writing and for more than a decade has worked with writers as a manuscript consultant and editor. She is the author of twelve published novels and many short stories. The most recent novel is Royal Flush, the sixth Jake Samson-Rosie Vicente mystery, published by Perseverance Press/John Daniel & Co. in 1999.

"Shelley Singer is simply the best. I'm reasonably certain that without her help, my first novel would be buried in my backyard somewhere, rather than going into its third printing. She encouraged me from chapter one to the end, gave me detailed and insightful feedback, and helped me take an amateur draft of a first novel and turn it into a polished manuscript.

Nobody can guarantee you success, but if you're already in the ballpark, Shelley Singer is the coach who can help you hit a home run."
Rick Riordan, triple-award-winning author of Big Red Tequila, The Widower's Two-Step, and
The Last King of Texas.

Since 1991, Singer has taught fiction writing at the University of California Extension in Berkeley and San Francisco (Mystery and Suspense Writing) and at Santa Cruz. She holds private workshops as well as one-on-one manuscript consultations, working with writers individually on literary novels and in every genre from memoir, mystery, and science fiction to horror.

Brenda
Townsend Hall
is a graduate of the Universities of London (BA honors) and Southampton (doctorate). A lecturer in English literature and then a language trainer, she crossed the English Channel and settled with her husband, a musicologist, in deepest rural France. She continued language training in French companies and started producing teaching materials and translating.

Following the acceptance of her first piece of creative writing, a verse play, The Crane, by BBC Radio 3 in 1992, she has continued to produce poetry, short stories, feature articles and a novel (published by Zander E-books, Necklace of Warm Snow, a finalist in the 2003 EPPIE awards). Now a freelance writer and editor, she writes nonfiction, specializing in the environment, sustainable development and issues relating to the European Union. However, she continues to write fiction and has just embarked on a novel set in the seventeenth century. As a British writer living in France she suffered a sense of isolation and so had the idea for the website, Worlds Apart Review, which she co-hosts with another British writer, Valerie Collins, who lives in Spain. Brenda Townsend Hall, Ph.D., lives in France.