ONE

Jeanette Driscoll opened her sparkling blue eyes, stretched out on the bed, and brushed back her long blonde hair before resting her head on her husband Ted’s chest. Tall, sandy-haired, and blue-eyed like his wife, Ted’s muscular frame complemented her model’s figure. Their friends and Ted’s colleagues where he worked as head of research and development at Bliss Pharmaceuticals often referred to them as the perfect couple.

“If we’re going to bring a kid into the world,” she said, “let’s create the most perfect one we can.”

Ted leaned in to her. “Like Hitler’s blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan boys?”

Jeanette hit him on the shoulder. “Stop it! I was thinking more along the lines of a Jesus, then again, maybe we want a little girl.”

Ted chuckled and kissed her. “I’m okay with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus, especially if he or she looks like their mother!”

“So many choices.” Jeanette groaned. “Part of me wishes we could go back to natural selection like our parents did.”

“It’s a crap shoot with too many unknowns,” Ted said with an air of finality. “Aside from that we’re both worried about birth defects, delivery complications, or other possibilities for trouble, not to mention the threat and the impact to your health.”

“I admit to being a little worried, but part of me craves the idea of nurturing a new life inside of me with all the warmth, connection, and intimacy that comes with it.”

Ted caressed the side of her face eliciting a dreamy smile. “I understand that as best as I can from a man’s perspective and I know that pregnancy can be exhausting, painful, nauseating, and sometimes flat-out dangerous. If you're pregnant and you stress too much, get sick, or catch some kind of flu or something, you might not be giving our child the best start we can.” He ran his hand down over her breasts and followed her sculpted curves down to the softness of her inner thigh. “Not to mention what it could do to your beautiful body.”

She giggled when he stroked her thigh and put her hand on his. “Stop it!”

He slid his hand out from under hers and continued his caresses. “Think about the benefits. We can continue having all the sex we want with no interruptions. You might not have the same birthing experience your mother had, but we'll both arrive at our first day of parenthood feeling physically fresh and well-rested, instead of you having been weighed down for months by a parasitic organism that could leave a path of destruction when you birth it. Even in the best case scenario there are possibilities of post-partum depression, hormone imbalances, and other post birth dangers.”

“Parasitic organism? That’s our child you’re talking about. You make it sound so horrible!”

“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I only want what is best for you and baby. You have to admit, the whole pregnancy thing takes a toll on you. If you take that into consideration and look at the positives, taking advantage of the technological benefits we are blessed with is the best way to go. Everything can be precisely controlled and monitored which eliminates any stress on beautiful you, and it ensures the safest, healthiest, most stable environment for our love child to grow in.”

They stayed quiet for awhile, then Jeanette sat up and grabbed her iPad from the bed stand. “Let’s take another look.” She propped herself up against the headboard, pulled her knees up and put the tablet in her lap, tapping the screen. Ted propped himself up beside her and put his arm...

Mary Otis is the author of Burst, longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and winner

of the 2023 Silver Medal in Literary Fiction from the Independent Book Publisher Awards.

The moving debut novel explores the relationship complexities between mothers and

daughters. She’s also the author of Yes, Yes Cherries, a collection of short stories author Lorrie

Moore called “funny, brave and amazing.” A founding fiction professor in the UC Riverside

David Starkey, Santa Barbara’s 2009-2011 Poet Laureate, Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at SBCC, and the Publisher/Co-editor of Gunpowder Press, published 11 full length collections of poetry and more than 500 poems in literary journals. His novel Poor Ghost was released in March 2024.

Emma Trelles Santa Barbara Poet Laureate 2021-2023, received an Established Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. She was named a Poet Laureate Fellow by the Academy of American Poets. Daughter of Cuban immigrants, she’s author of Tropicalia, winner of the Andrés Montoya Prize.

Moderator Karen K. Ford, SBWC workshop leader, is an award-winning author of short fiction whose honors include top prizes from Narrative and bosque. Her work has been shortlisted for the Tobias Wolff Fiction Award and the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Prize and anthologized in Ginosko. Karen lives in Southern California, with her rescue mutt, Dude, where she is a freelance editor and writing coach.

Max Talley has had 70 stories and essays published since 2015. His writing has appeared in Vol.1 Brooklyn, Atticus Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Litro, and The Saturday Evening Post. He won the 2021 best fiction contest in Jerry Jazz Musician for “Celestial Vagabonds,” later nominated for a Pushcart. Talley has two published novels and 2 story collections, My Secret Place, and the most recent, When the Night Breathes Electric, which debuted in 2023 from Borda Books.

Matthew J. Pallamary is an award-winning writer, musician, and sound healer who’s been studying shamanism all his life. He has books covering several genres. His latest story collection is The Thinning Veil: 13 Twisted Tales. He explores how art imitates life and reflects our human condition. The veil between the worlds is thinning and the boundaries have become blurred, bringing more weight to the question; what or where are the boundaries between what we believe to be real and what we imagine?

Melodie Johnson Howe, while acting in movies, went to UCLA Extension to learn writing. Her mystery novel, The Mother Shadow was nominated for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allen Poe Award. Her second, Beauty Dies, soon followed. She created a new character, Diana Poole, an actress verging on middle age, for her short stories. They’re now collected into one book, Shooting Hollywood: The Diana Poole Stories. Howe’s latest novel is City of Mirrors, also featuring Diana Poole.

Catherine Ann Jones who is an actor, the playwright of 11 award-winning productions, and an Emmy-nominated Hollywood screenwriter, wrote her latest book, East and West, from a personal place. This collection of stories reveals her lifelong relationship to India, including her marriage to Raja Rao, the renowned Indian novelist. The preface pays tribute to India’s timeless interweaving of the spiritual and the worldly, the light and dark, the personal and the universal. These stories speak to a place within each of our souls.

Lisa Cupolo has been a paparazzi photographer in London, an aid worker in Kenya, a script doctor in LA, and a literary publicist at HarperCollins in Toronto. Have Mercy on Us, her debut book, won the W.S. Porter Prize for short story collections. Her work has been published in many prestigious journals. She holds multiple degrees in a range of areas. She’s lived all over the world, but currently resides in Southern California, where she taught fiction writing at Chapman University.

The Art of the Query

Trey Dowell is a novelist and a short story aficionado. His expertise in writing effective query letters has helped numerous writers get their projects reviewed by agents and publishers.

In this presentation Trey focused on sparking curiosity and building anticipation. Proven query strategies and methods were discussed. Attendees brought their in-progress queries which were read and received feedback.

Be Your Own Best Publicist

Melinda Palacio & Lida Sideris

This session offers wisdom from the trenches from award-winning authors on promoting your project. You’ll get practical marketing advice on aspects of building an author platform and putting yourself and your book out there.

Melinda Palacio is an award-winning poet, author, and speaker. She’s the current Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara. Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, she holds 2 degrees in Comparative Literature, a BA from the UC Berkeley and an MA from UC Santa Cruz. She’s a 2007 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2009 poetry alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her latest poetry collection is Bird Forgiveness, 2018. She is a master of author self-promotion.

Lida Sideris writes soft-boiled mysteries and was a winner of the Helen McCloy Mystery Writers of America scholarship award. The third installment in her Southern California Mystery series, Murder: Double or Nothing will be released in June by Level Best Books. She’s also wrote The Cookie Eating Fire Dog, a picture book for ages 4-8. She lives in the northern tip of SoCal with her family, rescue dogs and a flock of uppity chickens. She teaches “Be Your Own Best Publicist” at SBWC with Melinda Palacio.

Antoine Wilson’s most recent novel Mouth to Mouth was featured on Barack Obama’s

Summer Reading List and was a finalist for The Scotiabank Giller Prize, the CALIBA Golden

Poppy Award, and the Prix Fitzgerald. Antoine is also the author of the novels Panorama City

and The Interloper, and he is a contributing editor of the literary magazine A Public Space. He’s

a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction

Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin.

Zohreh Ghahremani writes for both adults and children. Her debut picture book, Memory

Garden, illustrated by her daughter, Susie, was published by Godwin Books/Macmillan in 2024,

with another picture book about Norooz/Persian New Year to follow in 2026. She published

her first novel, Sky of Red Poppies, in 2010. Her sophomore novel, The Moon Daughter, won

Writer’s Digest Book Awards for Best Literary Fiction. She’s also the author of The Commiserator

(in Persian) and has contributed to numerous other literary volumes.