Behind the Scenes
Heron Moon Press was founded in 2008 by Iris Graville (a SHARK REEF writer) to self-publish her first book, Hands at Work—Portraits and Profiles of People Who Work with Their Hands (www.handsworking.com). The award-winning 144-page hardcover, written by Graville with photographs by Summer Moon Scriver, has been called “deep, meaningful and profound” by Matthew Fox, author of The Reinvention of Work. Hands at Work received the 2009 Independent Publisher Award for Outstanding Book, “Most Life-Changing” category, as well as the 2010 Nautilus Book Award for “Best of Small Press” and the 2011 Eric Hoffer Award for “Best Self-Published Book.”
Lorna Reese is a founder and, currently, managing editor of SHARK REEF. For several years she has worked with a different co-editor for this magazine, loving the collaboration with other writers.
She says her writing life began in earnest in 1997 during her first writing class in a small community center on a neighboring island when she read aloud a writing exercise and felt the raw power of her story. It opened her up, turned her inside out and she walked around with open psychic sores for months. She keeps picking at the scabs as though what oozes out from under will be healing – or a good story anyway.
Her memoirs and fiction been published in SHARK REEF, The Sun Magazine and The Islands Weekly. She delights in acting as a sort of midwife for other writers.
John Sangster is a poet who has been published in literary magazines and anthologies. His chapbook Island Year was published in 2008 by Pudding House Press. He is a Fishtrap Fellow and Jack Straw Writer, and is currently writing a memoir including prose and poetry. He served as a co-editor of the Summer 2011 issue of SHARK REEF.
Poetry co-editor for the Summer 2011 issue, Dr. Elizabeth Landrum is a clinical psychologist, now retired and living on Lopez Island in the Pacific Northwest. She recently rediscovered a love of poetry as a channel for introspection and observation.
Jennifer Brennock, co-editor for prose for the Winter 2012 Issue, earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Jennifer is assistant director of Artsmith, an Orcas Island nonprofit supporting writers and visual artists. She teaches creative writing and English composition. Excerpts from her memoir, Barren, can be read in Line Zero, Pitkin Review, and the anthology Becoming: What Makes a Woman. Her novel in progress, Not Jewish, is about a family refusing to blend. Jennifer’s Trigger Happy at jenniferbrennock.blogspot.com.
Ann Duecy Norman’s career mirrors the history of many midcentury women: traditional wives, mothers, and museum docents who morphed into community activists. Her writing career began as a member of a collaborative which documented the sexuality concerns of a long ignored but growing minority, women with physical disabilities. In middle age, Ann returned to academia, earned a doctorate (a fiftieth birthday gift to herself) and taught at the University of Washington where she coordinated innovative community based AIDS prevention research projects and co-authored studies and reports. Now retired, she attends writing classes and works on a book about grace and grit and fear and a family’s struggle not to allow Alzheimer’s to rob them of someone they love. She was co-editor for prose for the Summer 2011 edition of SHARK REEF.
