CONTRIBUTORS & THEIR WORKS |
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Tools of the Trade - Weebly.com
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Charlene Anderson has an MA in English Literature from Purdue University and an MA in Research Psychology from SFSU. She spent much of her working life doing research grant administration during the day and writing fiction at night, and in 2001 published a novel. When Vistas & Byways was launched in 2015, she was pleased to be asked to chair the Editorial Board, and has served in that capacity ever since. She is also pleased to be able to submit her own work to the magazine!
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Contributions to this issue:
V&B Editorial Board Chair Fiction: Dark Matter, A Science Fantasy Photo Essay: A Puzzling Parklet Inside OLLI: Transit Zone |
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Barbara Applegate received a BA at UC Berkeley, with a major in Spanish, and an MS in Education at CSU, East Bay. As an administrator of Early Childhood Education, she developed a program to teach parents in non-English speaking families the value of helping their children retain the home language while learning English. She is the mother of 3 daughters, a traveler and a contemplative. She loves taking writing classes - not only because she learns from them, but because they give her structure for writing.
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Contributions to this issue:
Editorial Board Member, Fiction and Nonfiction Editor Poetry: Blades of Grass Joy Slipping Photo Essay: Scenes in the City |
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Beverly "Bree" Brown completed a BA and MA in Creative Writing at SFSU. She has expressed herself through poetry since she was a young girl. Her favorite quote is, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” (Muriel Rukeyser) Bree was born with words engraved on both hands and has loved words for as long as she can remember. And she remembers Grandma Rudin buying her her first book of poems when she was 8. She believes poetry lives inside us all—it will connect us to the deepest parts of ourselves if we let it.
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Ed Brownson’s plays have been performed in California, New York and Italy, with many developmental and staged readings along the way. His latest, Tap, Tap Tap, about a woman confronting a horrible past, was selected for production as part of the Playwright Center of San Francisco’s Fall 2021 ‘Best of…’ series. He has studied playwriting at American Conservatory Theatre, Central Works Theater Company, Theater Artists’ Conspiracy and many informal venues. Recently, he has been working on essays and long and short fiction, ‘attending’ numerous pandemic-inspired Zoom classes and groups to help him along the way.
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Contributions to this issue:
Fiction: Ms Noir and the Night Caller Nonfiction: Ghost City Is That All There Is? In Praise of the Anthropomorph |
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Joe Catalano practiced law for more than 30 years before he retired in 2018. He has since pursued his interests in photography, high performance driving, travel, and writing. He has enjoyed his first OLLI as SF State courses in the spring semester 2019 and thanks the members of the OLLI at SF State Poetry Writing interest group for their input and support. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Joan.
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Contributions to this issue:
Member - Editorial Board , Poetry Editor Nonfiction: Snake! A Memoir Photo Essay: Evolution of our Species |
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Thomas O. Davenport is an independent writer and business advisor. He spent 32 years as a human resource consultant for a global consulting organization. He has written three business books and many serious articles and now writes sardonic verse on business and social phenomena that amuse and bemuse him. His collection of humorous poems, Get the Hell to Work, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books. In addition to Visas & Byways, his work has appeared in Defenestration, WORK Literary Magazine and in the anthologies Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle (Kelsay Books, 2019) and Tales from the Classifieds (Blue Cubicle Press, 2020). You can also read his writings on his website, www.worklodes.com.
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Mickey Eliason is a recently retired faculty member from San Francisco State University with a background in nursing, psychology, and public health. She harkens originally from Iowa and spent twenty-five years on faculty at the University of Iowa. She was propelled to San Francisco in 2005 by a midlife crisis, and transitioned from land-locked stoic midwestern to California beach bum. After a lifetime of academic writing, she is experimenting with different writing genres, but mostly to creative nonfiction. She has self-published two volumes of humor writing: a parody of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual outlining unique lesbian pathologies (The Dyke Dykignostic Manual) and short stories written recently (Pandemic Procrastination and Ponderings). Both are available on Amazon.
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Contributions to this issue:
Fiction-Work: A Phenomenological Study of Pandemic Work Life: Adverse Effects of Zooming |
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Elsa Fernandez grew up in Asia. She has lived in San Francisco since 1970 and never gets tired of this lovely city. She has travelled the world and still gets excited flying back home and to finally land at SFO. Her family is scattered around the world—India, Australia, Dubai, England, Ireland and Argentina. She is a political junkie and majored in Journalism and Political Science. She loves music and plays the piano quite well (one of her dreams was to own a piano bar in upcountry Maui . . . she would probably call it the Maui Moon!). Writing poetry is an emotional outlet for her.
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Contributions to this issue:
Inside OLLI Reporter, Launch Party Caterer Poetry: The Owl on Sixteenth Street Inside OLLI: Book Review - Pandemic Puzzle Poems, Edited by Diane Frank Nonfiction: The Death of Free Speech |
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Find your passion and follow it! - Oprah Winfrey
Cathy Fiorello’s passions are food, Paris, and writing. A morning at a farmers’ market is her idea of excitement and visiting Paris is her idea of heaven. And much of her writing is about food and Paris. She worked in publishing in New York, freelanced for magazines during her child-rearing years, then re-entered the work world as an editor. She moved to San Francisco in 2008 and published a memoir, Al Capone Had a Lovely Mother. In 2018, she published a second memoir, Standing at the Edge of the Pool. Cathy has two children and four grandchildren. Her mission is to make foodies and Francophiles of them all. |
Contributions to this issue:
Nonfiction-Work: Knowing When to Quit Nonfiction: Take Me Standing at the Edge of the Pool |
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Diane Frank is author of seven books of poems, two novels, and a memoir of her 400-mile trek in the Himalayas. Blackberries in the Dream House, her first novel, won the Chelson Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Canon for Bears and Ponderosa Pines received honors in the SF Book Festival. Letters from a Sacred Mountain Place: A Journey through the Nepal Himalayas, invites you into the mountains with stories, poems and 53 color photographs. Diane teaches in the OLLI Program at SFSU. She edited the bestselling anthology, River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the 21st Century. She also plays cello in the Golden Gate Symphony. For more information go to: www.dianefrank.net
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Contributions to this issue:
Poetry: Walkways: Letter in the Dark from Tatopani Hot Springs, Letter from a Secret Mountain Place |
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Kathy Gilbert received her MFA from San Francisco State University in 2013 after a career in public transport. She received the Mark Linenthal Poetry Award in 2012 from SFSU and won the San Francisco Browning Society Gita Specker Award three times for her dramatic monologues. She was commissioned to write a play for the 2015 San Francisco Olympians Festival. Her one act Delphin and the Children of Amphitrite was performed at the Exit Theater. She also tutors third graders, studies tai chi, practices yoga and swims. Her new book Aprils Three: Poems and Photographs is now available locally at Bird & Beckett, West Portal Books, Green Apple on Clement and on Amazon.
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Matt Ginsburg received an MFA degree in Creative Writing with a concentration in playwriting at San Francisco State University. His work often explores his interest in business, economics, and politics. Matt has written several short stories, monologues, and comedy routines in addition to his focus on playwriting. His plays have been read or performed at numerous theaters in San Francisco. He has had two works published in previous editions of Vistas & Byways: “Finding My Father,” a memoir piece was published in fall 2019, and “Midnight in Morocco,” a short story was published in fall 2020.
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Contributions to this issue:
Member-Editorial Board, Fiction & Nonfiction Editor, Editor's Preview Nonfiction: The Ties That Bind |
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A native of San Francisco, Kathryn Santana Goldman’s interest in poetry began when she was working in ICU as a registered nurse. She used this practice to process the variety of stressful scenarios experienced. Over the years, she has continued to experiment with different types of writing such as short stories and plays. As an avid traveler, Kathryn has become skilled at capturing photographs about the diversity she encounters. Three years ago, she began to combine her love of photography with her writing by using the images she captures as seeds for her poems. She continues to explore new ways to use these two art forms to share her experience with family and friends.
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Michael Gordon grew up in East Los Angeles. After serving in the U.S. Army, he graduated from the California State University at Los Angeles. He moved to Berkeley in 1965 to work with the Mayor and city government. He worked on Montgomery Street for E.F. Hutton and retired from Morgan Stanley forty years later. Married to Martha Hoover, he raised a daughter in the Russian Hill neighborhood. Post retirement, he discovered OLLI at SF State, as well as San Francisco City Guides. He takes about ten OLLI at SF State classes every year. Michael leads several City Guide tours, all free, including the Murals of Coit Tower, The Landmark Victorians of Alamo Square and Fort Mason to Aquatic Park.
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Mary Heldman is retired from a career in medical school administration, computer programming, and business systems analysis. She grew up in Los Angeles, but lived in Palo Alto, Washington D.C., Cambridge, and Stony Brook, New York before settling in San Francisco in 1974. She tutors at a local high school, studies piano, and designs costume jewelry. From time to time she writes sardonic prose for her friends. Mary wishes she lived with a chocolate lab or a golden retriever, but she doesn’t.
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Contributions to this issue:
Member-Editorial Board, Proofreader |
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Joyce Hendrickson is a writer, editor, and publisher—first in Chicago then San Francisco. All starting with the underground newspaper she helmed in middle and high school. She has published three books of poetry (Mind Jazz, You Bring Yourself, Now Open). two books of photo essays (Seeing San Francisco, Vol 1 and 2), and a short story collection (Love and Other Confusing Stories) from which this story comes. “With a nod to surrealism and mystery short fiction, these stories aim to amaze, confuse, and amuse all of us who both believe in and run from love.”
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Since age six, Vivian Imperiale has been writing poetry to identify and process her emotions about the world around her. She soon learned that her poems could be meaningful to others. A friend touched her with these words, "You gave me words for an emotion I didn't even know I needed to express."
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Dr. Vera Jacobson was a teacher and administrator for 30 years. She is happily writing short stories, watercoloring, and doing pencil sketching. If she is not at home, you would probably find her sailing on the San Francisco Bay. She lives in Brisbane with her dog, Peter.
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Mike Lambert is a long-time resident of San Francisco and led the effort to start Vistas & Byways in the fall of 2015. In an earlier life, he worked in the telecommunications industry for 35 years and taught at San Francisco State University’s College of Business for 15 years. He refutes the adage about old dogs and new tricks. He took up creative writing as a hobby at age 75. He recently self-published two novels and a collection of his short stories. His main fictional character is Jessica Jones, a single working girl in contemporary San Francisco. See his Author page at Amazon under the name of M. L. Lambert for more details.
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Contributions to this issue:
Webmaster, Launch Party M C Poetry-Work A Retired Man's Milieu Inside OLLI: The State of OLLI - Interview with Kathy Bruin |
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Born in Rochester, NY, Dan Liberthson attended Northwestern University and SUNY at Buffalo (PhD, English), has retired from a career as a medical writer, and lives in San Francisco and Cottage Grove, OR. He has published five books of poetry and individual poems in many journals, including The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, South Coast Poetry Journal, Elysian Fields Quarterly, and Chaminade Literary Review. Dan has also written The Bluejay Contrivance, a spy novel, and The Golden Spider, a young-adult fantasy novel. Currently Secretary of the Oregon Poetry Association, Dan took second place in the William Stafford Memorial Award Poetry Contest (2020) and in the Maine Poets Society Contest (2022).
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Linda Zamora Lucero is writing a collection of short stories set in San Francisco’s Mission District. She recently won first prize in the DeMarinis Short Story Contest, “Speak to Me of Love,” (to be published in Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, August 2021). Among her published stories are: “When It Rains” (Yellow Medicine Review, 2020, Pushcart nominee; “Mexican Hat,” Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century (Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, 2020); “Balmy Alley Forever,” (Santa Clara Review 2016, reprinted in Yellow Medicine Review, 2016); and “Take the Money and Run—1968” (Bilingual Review, 2015). Linda has a BA in Spanish from SFSU. She is the Executive/Artistic Director of Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, an outdoor performing arts series.
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Karen Marker submits poems to Rattle’s Poets Respond (to the news) and reads this poetry on the open mic with RattleCast. This past May she was a featured reader for Rivertown Poets out of Petaluma. Karen was honored to win first place prize for an essay, “Ruth in the Redwoods,” in the 2021 Keats Soul Making contest and that one of her poems was chosen to be in the Kent State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives. Karen is also grateful that she had the opportunity to work with the Young Writers Program through Santa Cruz’s Cornerstone Project, and to work with so many talented poets through PandaPoets and through OLLI including Kathleen McClung, Diane Frank and Jannie Dresser.
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Contributions to this issue:
Poetry-Work Going Back to Work in Retrospect Custodian of the Light in San Francisco Customer Service Poetry: Passing My Swim Test in the Freedom Summer |
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Angie Minkin is a coauthor of Dreams and Blessings: Six Visionary Poets. A poetry editor and contributor at Vistas & Byways Review, her work also appears in Birdland Journal, Motherscope, New Verse News, and the Pangolin Review, and will be forthcoming in the anthology Fog and Light. Angie has attended numerous writing workshops and is a member of the Marin Poetry Center, the Bay Area Poets Coalition, and the Academy of American Poets. When not writing, she practices yoga, takes dance classes, and travels to Oaxaca, Mexico, whenever possible.
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Contributions to this issue:
Poetry-Work: Tow Truck Blues at 4 A.M. Poetry: On Jerry Day, I Look for My Mother |
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Carla Pasion was born in San Francisco. Recently retired from all gainful employment, she now practices writing, gardening, and binge watching, most recently completing a total re-watch of The Sopranos. She has two adult daughters and one long-term husband.
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Meta Pasternak is a retired high school English teacher who moved to San Francisco from Lafayette 10 years ago. Besides writing, she enjoys being a volunteer tutor at Redding Elementary School in San Francisco.
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Mary Noel Pepys is a senior attorney with a specialization in the rule of law, specifically international legal and judicial reform, and corruption within the judiciary. Since 1993 she has helped emerging democracies develop justice systems that ensure the protection of citizens’ human rights, equal treatment of all individuals before the law, and a predictable legal structure with fair, transparent and effective government institutions. Mary Noel has worked in over 45 countries, lived five years in six former communist countries, and 20 months in Afghanistan as the Justice Advisor for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement of the U.S. Department of State. While in Afghanistan, Mary Noel focused on strengthening the criminal justice system and the correctional system.
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Gail Persily is originally from Chicago and has lived in San Francisco since 1982. Since retiring from UCSF in 2019, she has been exploring a variety of pursuits, including writing, working on voter turnout efforts, cooking when she is in the mood, and walking instead of driving. She and her wife Denise love road trips and working on their home and garden.
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After becoming an attorney, Pamela Pitt graduated with an MFA (1990) from the San Francisco Art Institute. She showed her photography work nationally in group and solo shows. Seeking daylight after years in the dark room, she worked on collage with mixed media painting and photography. Ideas from social issues became the basis of certain collage series:
2014: ripped pages from a law book on the “Patriot Act” to use as collage elements. 2016: used tissue dress "Patterns" in a series about the place of women. 2017: produced a collage series based on the concept of making land a commodity. With her current focus on photography and scanner digital art, Pam works on achieving peace through creativity and beauty. |
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Lynne Rappaport moved to San Francisco at the age of 22 and never looked back. Born in New York City, she was raised in the rural Catskills in a village of 1000 people. She attended college in Buffalo but eventually transferred to SFSU, completing a BA in Humanities in 1978 and meeting her future husband in a class on Contemporary Culture. Lynne retired recently from a long career in ESL classrooms, teaching adult immigrants in Daly City. She is a student of Tai Chi Chih, a singer in an older adult community choir, and a 30-year resident of the Sunset District, where she seeks out nature at Ocean Beach, Stern Grove, and Golden Gate Park.
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Bernal Heights resident Karen Rhodes retired from UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering in 2017 as Executive Director for Marketing and Communications, following a 40-year career in higher education. She serves on the boards of Walk San Francisco and the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council and is a member of the city’s Parks, Recreation, and Open Space Advisory Committee. She loves to organize urban walks for OLLI, Walk San Francisco, the Crosstown Trail Coalition, and anyone willing to explore with her.
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David A. Scott is a retired psychotherapist living with his wife, two dogs, and a cat in Fresno, California. He has written poetry for most of his life and had a few poems published.
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Dennis Sides has been a software developer, book editor, professional musician, construction project manager, tech writer, and world traveler. He's hung up his traveling shoes during covid, but hopes to get back out on the road soon. He's lived in the Fillmore long enough to qualify for "San Francisco native" status.
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Pat Skala is a native San Franciscan (only 3 generations) and a graduate of San Francisco State College. (Note the "C". Had she waited a year longer to graduate it would be a "U.") A retired City employee, Pat and her husband live in the house that her grandparents built in 1927. She is a gardener, a quilter and an avid jigsaw puzzle person. Although she would love to be a star on Moth Radio, she limits her storytelling to friends and family. Her stories are true and focus on what she thinks of as "angels:" people who come into our lives ever so briefly, but who give us something we need or point us in a better direction.
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Denize Springer's nonfiction and fiction have appeared in various publications and literary journals including The New York Times, Marin Independent Journal, East Bay Express, Pearl, Estero, Vistas & Byways, Please See Me and Ocean Realm. Her plays and adaptations have been presented in distinguished New York and San Francisco venues including the New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theatre and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Her short story, “The Way We Say Goodbye,” was named one of 15 semi-finalists in the 2019 Tillie Olsen Short Story Award. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from SFSU and has taught courses in scene writing, genre and story structure at OLLI at SF State.
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Steve Surryhne was an Associate Lecturer in English Literature at San Francisco State University from 1993-2012. He is currently semi-retired and has recently returned to writing poetry. A native of San Francisco, he was a baby-beat in the sixties, knew some of the beat poets and is now a neo-beat. In his alternate career, he worked in Community Mental Health in San Francisco from 1979-2012. He took first place in the Jack Kerouac Poetry contest in 2015 and has published in The Blue Moon Review and Interpretations. He is currently working on a project with a photographer friend on poem-texts and photos.
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Lucy Sweeney is a graduate of UC Berkeley with a major in Music. She remained a serious choral singer while working as a professional baker, performing with Masterworks Chorale. Upon her return to teaching, she performed with the Stanford Early Music Singers and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. Lucy discovered the joys of genealogy research when she retired. She edited Lozano, a book of stories about her extended family. With expert guidance from Barbara Rose Brooker at OLLI, Lucy wrote Silent Hero, the story of her father in World War II. Lucy and her grandson Adam are currently writing a family cookbook.
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Mark Thoma has practiced medical social work for thirty years and is semi-retired. He recently took his first OLLI class. Mark likes to cook, make bread from the The Tassajara Bread Book, hike, read, write poetry, and help maintain a neighborhood garden. Mark's first encouragement for writing came from his fourth grade Creative Writing teacher (yes! a teacher just for creative writing!) when he was ten years old. He has been writing poetry on and off since. Mark lives with his husband in San Francisco.
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Yoka Verdoner is an eighty-seven-year-old hyphenated American. She came here from the Netherlands as a child shortly after World War II, during which she was a hidden child. She has always felt at least half European. Her professional life was as an educator and as a psychotherapist. Her passions are books, film, and the news. The enjoyable first two help mitigate the impact of the third.
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Louise Victor is passionate about her work and eager to inspire others to explore their creativity. She attended Northern Illinois University and Graduate School at the University of Minnesota. Her paintings explode with energy, movement and color, evoking worlds that are intriguing and captivating. Louise’s lectures and workshops have been presented at Arts Benicia, Marin MOCA, the ICB, Jen Tough Gallery and The Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley among others. Foundational to Louise’s visual expression is her many years as an aviator. She is the second woman in the world to qualify as a Captain on the Boeing 757/767, capturing in her paintings the “the feeling of the substance of the air, its supporting power, its buoyancy."
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A retired physician, Corey Weinstein is a musician, poet, songwriter and clarinet player. He has published two CDs of original music inspired by the Klezmer and Yiddish stage musical traditions and led Umzist, a Klezmer band playing benefits for Jewish elders for more than a decade. He wrote and performed at various venues a singspiel, Erased: Babi Yar, the SS and Me to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the massacre at Babi Yar. He plays clarinet in the Or Shalom Jewish Community choir, with The Jamberries Jazz Band at Shabbat services at Rhoda Goldman Plaza, and with any chamber music group he can find. He lives in the Ingleside of San Francisco with his wife of 40 years, Pat Skala.
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