Jamie Lammers, Nederland. Last Thursday night, the Backdoor Theater held the very first NEDx event. The organizers -- Liz Hamilton, Eileen Purdy, and Krista Crabtree -- hope to make this an annual event that changes themes every year. This year, the Backdoor gathered six local women writers to present their backstories, what got them into writing, how they’ve developed their craft, and why they love writing so much.

Crabtree, a freelance writer for SKI and Outside Magazines and author of the children’s book Being Stellar, opened the event, talking about the importance of mentors and muses in writing. Her well-worded and well-researched speech revolved around the meaning of these words -- mentor meaning a teacher or advisor to someone and muse meaning a force that inspires their ideas. She discussed her search for her own mentor, encouraged the audience to educate themselves on what passion drives them, and told how she found her muse through absorbing herself in nature.

Following Crabtree was Cindy Weaver, who has worked as a teacher for both private and public education for over twenty years and who wrote Losing My Breath: From Loss to Transformation. She pulled the audience in with her speech, which considered the significance of pain and loss in art, and speaking with an engaging voice that one would want to hear a bedtime story from. She talked about the loss of her daughter after she was hit by a car in 2010, her period of grief where she isolated herself from the world, and how writing allowed her to express her emotions and open herself up. She brought up how, through her writing and soaking up nature, she found a new way to walk through life and express her real, raw self through art.

After Weaver was Jane Wodening, a Chicago native who has written quite a few books about animals, including Animals I’ve Neglected to Mention and The Wolf Dictionary. She discussed her passion for animals and her desire to understand them through her writing. She emphasized the distinction between writing -- having something you need or want to express through words on paper -- and being a writer -- actually making a career out of those expressions. She talked about a longtime friend and how her death made her realize that if she didn’t write soon, she wouldn’t be able to write at all. She penned a story about her friend before writing one that she has told orally many times over the last twenty years. She recited that latter story, which centers around an encounter with an orangutan while she was at the zoo with her family, at the end of her speech, and you could tell it was from her heart. She said that her husband was holding their baby and the orangutan became fascinated with it, gesturing to indicate her desire to hold the baby. Wodening kept the audience hooked through her gestures and the passion in her voice.

At the halfway mark of the event, the Twintet Quartet, a string quartet consisting of twins Jake and Emily Geels and twins Aya and Keahi Pelkhum Donahue, played a musical interlude. They played the theme song from Pirates of the Caribbean, Haydn’s The Bird, a medley of Russian pieces titled Postcards from Russia, and the Irish folk song Danny Boy.

Opening the second half of the event was Laura Roettiger, an environmental educator and STEM teacher who wrote the children’s book Aliana Reaches for the Moon. She discussed the ever-changing idea of what an individual wants to be when they grow up and her path toward reaching her personal aspirations to be a writer. She talked about interviewing presidential candidates Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader, offers she received to write for the soap opera The Young and the Restless and its spinoff The Bold and the Beautiful, and eventually coming out to Colorado to write children’s books, where she found she didn’t have as much experience as she thought. She took the constructive criticism she was given and worked over two years to improve her style and get her first book published. Her message about cultivating patience with getting published is an immensely helpful message for writers who desperately want to get a book published.

Next came Loren Levitt, Houston-born writer and co-author of The Beauty of Authenticity, who discussed her initial aversion to writing. Not only was it not as personal as telling stories in-person, but she also worried she wouldn’t be able to find her own style and would take too much after her mother, a romance novelist. During her speech, she encouraged the audience to embrace passions that spark curiosity and communicate them in whatever way they see fit, adding humorous anecdotes along the way.

Finally, Karen Auvinen, who wrote the memoir Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living and whose work has been included in The New York Times, Lithub, Real Simple and Westword, among others, took to the stage to discuss her struggle finding an independent female role model. She idolized the Marlborough Man out of desperation because she couldn’t think of many independent females who were able to go it alone. Even her father expected her to go into a stereotypical female job. She wanted to, as she put it, live wild and alone. She wanted to walk away from the typical female role to find independence through living freely. After a while, however, she realized that the true “Marlborough Woman” shouldn’t only live wild and alone. She should work towards making her own decisions and being the hero of her own life’s tale, which is the perfect final message for an event like this.

If the audience took one thing away from this year’s NEDx, it’s that writing isn’t just a method of telling stories. It’s a method of personal expression, of being able to let out your bottled-up anger or sadness or even happiness through specific usage of written words. It’s a way of expressing pain, desire, connection to others, and intriguing life events. These six women writers demonstrated that beautifully, and hopefully NEDx will continue and thrive after this first successful night. 

(Originally published in the October 24, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)