Member of the Month

Spend some time with this month's featured writer.




Marcia Colpan




Marcia Colpan has a wonderful sense of humor which she manages to combine with her talent for writing to create delightful stories, articles, and anecdotes. Her unique perspectives on everyday situations entertain us daily on The Write List. Her submitted work is consistently of high quality and a pleasure to read and critique.

Of course, as I've said before, level of talent is irrelevant when I'm choosing a Member of the Month. The reason I chose Marcia is because in addition to being the comedienne of the bunch, she is also one of the most encouraging and supportive people on the list. She makes an effort to critique each and every submission to the list and always puts a positive spin on things, searching for the good in every work.

Marcia also participates regularly in the list features and answers questions of other members. She speaks to each new member, making them feel welcome. But, my favorite thing Marcia does, which may seem silly after all I've said above, is that she ends every post with "Write On!" I don't know what it is about that phrase but it motivates me whenever I read it.

OK, now I'll stop talking and turn the page over to Marcia....

I'm Marcia Colpan and I live in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Don't feel badly if you haven't heard of it. I'm 42 and married to a wonderful man that was born in Turkey. He is now a naturalized citizen. I have two incredible and talented children. Hope is 12 years old and is a budding artist. She just took second place in a city wide poster contest. Jonny is 6 and he's showing signs of being my little writer. He's always asking me to help him with his stories. I am self-employed as a professional daycare provider, and I spend almost 16 hours a day doing my best to be a Mom to about six children besides my own that need care, guidance and the occasional kick in the pants. I enjoy writing and am doing my best to get some of my fiction actually in print. I do write for two fanfiction sites, KMG 365 Emergency fanzine, and ChiPs Fanfiction Page where my work is generally well received. I was thrilled to win a Brothy Award for best crossover story from the KMG-365 site. The work there is outstanding and it's wonderful to get recognized in that crowd of talent. I work as assistant editor for the Mama's Little Helper newsletter in both print and web formats. We just recently set up a website and that has been taking a good bit of my time. In my spare time, I take college courses in the human development field and expect to get my associate's degree this year. I also enjoy cooking, crochet, reading and collecting dolls and trading cards.




Index


Q & A With Marcia Colpan
Marcia's Tips for Writers
Selected Works by Marcia: Hope's Story and That House
Marcia's Favorite Links

Home
December's MOTM: Megan Murphy
November's MOTM: Luglenda McClain
October's MOTM: Chuck Bednar



Q & A With Marcia Colpan


How long have you been writing?


If you mean how long have I been telling stories, since about age 3. If you mean writing stories, I'd say age 12. If you mean actually getting people to notice that I have a bit of a knack for that sort of thing, age 16. If you mean published and recognized, I'll let you know.


How did you get started writing and what is the first thing you completed?


I would say that the first thing I completed in writing was a new age fable. It was written for a contest in junior high and I took first place.


Who inspired you the most?


Oh geez, that's a hard one. I have had many people show faith in me. Often more faith than I have in myself. The first one outside of my family would be Keith Pelletier. He's a wonderful man and runs the ChiPs fanfiction site. He keeps me from hitting my delete key too often. Then, of course, and without a doubt is my writing partner, Terri Andrews. She's terrific and honestly thinks I can write a book. Oh, and we can't forget Jordan and Luglenda who keep me honest and moving.


What/who are some of your favorite books and authors?


Oh my…..now I need to make this big list. I guess the first time I was in awe of the written word was my first brush with Charles Dickens. The man has a genius that time will never take away. David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, if he wrote it, I've probably read it many times over. Then I went into my Ayn Rand phase. I dearly loved Atlas Shrugged. It just blew me away. What a wonderful way with words the woman has. She was into women's liberation long before it was popular. In Romance writers, I'd have to say Johanna Lindsay. Of course, we can't leave out Frank Yerby, Eli Wallace, Erma Bombeck, and a full host of others.


Are there any particular writing resources, such as books or software that have helped your writing?


The Writer's Market is a must have. As for software, I dearly love my Microsoft Office 97. The WP is so easy to use and so versatile and it can convert to almost any document type. The Excel is wonderful for keeping records.


Have you had any specific writing training?


I've taken a few writing courses while I've been in college. Although they were fun, and I enjoyed them, I'm not sure they gave me the style I have now. That just kind of developed on its own.


Do you have any sort of routine that you follow when writing or weird rituals that help you get started?


I put the kids down to nap. Naptime is that part of the day when I have peace, quiet and a load of caffeine. You can only appreciate this if you have 6 - 7 children flying around the room until that moment when naptime comes.


What at are your strengths and weaknesses in writing?


My beginnings need to be stronger. I have a real problem with those. I think my plots and characters are both strong, though. They actually take over my writing and have a life of their own. That's when I know they're working. I hit that point where the characters are standing over my shoulder telling me what to write and I know I have a winner.


What do you most enjoy writing?


I love to write humor. Not always the HAHA kind, but more of the creeping smile around the corners of the mouth kind.


What's the one thing you've written that you are most proud of and why?


ONE----oooooo, that's rough. At this point, it would be a toss up between Hope's Story and Burnt Cookies. I have a few fanfics I'm also proud of, but they are not as easily related to by non-fans.


What do you consider the worst thing you have written and why?


That would be a piece of fanfic called "Sunburn". I wrote it as a joke and everyone loved it. I just can't see why. I find the whole thing to be nothing but fluff. Well, there's no accounting for taste.


Have you ever had anything published?


I was published in Crochet World for an article about crocheting a cover for a tic tac container that turned it into a pill case. (Don't laugh, they paid well.) I also had a few paragraphs in the Ladies Home Journal about living with a foreign mother-in-law. Other than that, I've been mainly web published at the two web sites, I have had a number of articles printed in the Mama's Little Helper Newsletter and the DPX newsletter. I was the featured writer for Bianca's Write! Magazine for November, 1998.


Do you have any current writing projects?


I'm still working on my romance novel, I have several articles due for the Newsletter, Terri Andrews and I will be continuing to work on our book "Embracing ADHD", and I have several websites that have requested various fanfiction pieces.


What are your future writing goals?


I think my goal is primarily to get published a bit more often. I would also like to see the book Terri and I are working on get into the next stage of it's development and get finished up. It will be an upbeat aide for parent's of children with ADHD and its cousin disorders. I really think it will be beneficial.
Marcia's Tips for Writers


I find that most people have problems in two areas. The first is actually writing. You remember, it's that moment when you sit down to the computer and you're mind becomes this blank with not a single thought roaming through it. The second is putting the work in the mail and sending it to a publisher. For the first, I suggest that you sit down with some work that is not what you intend to do first. I will often start writing a fanfic or a letter to a friend before turning to what I really want to accomplish. It's like a dancer warming up before a performance. I like to get those fingers working and then I can go from there. In the case of the fiction, I set my tongue firmly in my cheek and leave conscious thought in the living room. Then I sit down to write. As for number two, there is only one way I get that done. I make myself send out at least one thing per week. If I don't, I then have to do two the next week. I've never had my guilt let me go beyond three.
Selected Works


In addition to the stories below, Marcia's work can be found at this site on the exercise pages.

Hope's Story

My daughter, Hope, has what I have come to know is a common learning problem, visual perception difficulties. Often mistaken for dyslexia or ADD, she has none of the more traumatic problems that are associated with those conditions. However, she does demonstrate consistent problems with discriminating between b and d or p and q. The number three will often be written backwards. Right and left have very little meaning for her. The face of a clock is a muddled mess. She has taken almost three times as long to integrate lateral and directionality skills as her classmates and has demonstrated problems in visual motor integration in such areas as copying printed material from one place to another accurately in a timed situation.

These difficulties produced almost insurmountable problems during first grade when she had to learn to read. The problems were further complicated by her extremely well developed auditory skills. Since she had learned long before we did that she could not trust her eyes, she had developed auditory skills that bordered on total recall. The teacher would read a story to the class prior to teaching them to read it. As soon as Hope heard the story, she had it down. She was able to hide her inability to read until almost second grade when the length of the stories increased to the point where she was unable to repeat verbatim the story. However, the recall was still so strong that she was able to recount 99% of the written material's substance when asked.

Since she was performing at an average level in school and was not a discipline problem, the school decided that remediation was unnecessary and allowed her to struggle on her own through sixth grade even though it often took her three hours to accurately produce twenty minutes worth of homework. Meetings and discussions with the teachers were ineffective. Either they discounted the independent report of the specialist or they simply felt that since she was able to maintain a C average without any extra work on their part that they had other needier students to assist. It was a difficult and frustrating time for all involved.

I had discussed the problem I was having with a friend that was a karate instructor. It was suggested that she try some basic karate and included relaxation exercises. The karate was not to her liking, but the relaxation exercises proved to be worth more than all the special instruction in the world. She would kneel on the floor with her hands palm down on her thighs. Then she would inhale slowly counting to ten and then exhale counting to ten. The first time, she sat for about one minute. By the time she had finished her lessons with the instructor, she was sitting for 15 minutes at a time. When she would finish, she would be relaxed, focused and totally calm. The first time I noticed the difference in school was when I attended a special class where they were watching a presentation by the teacher. Every other child was moving, whispering, wiggling, and giggling. My daughter sat perfectly still with her full attention on the teacher's face and her hands laying relaxed in her lap. She was absolutely beautiful. She was serene and poised and everyone in the room noticed her. Later the teacher asked me what we were doing. Hope had always been particularly active during demonstrations of any kind. Since visual input was difficult for her to understand, she would become restless during presentations and become extremely active. All I could think of was the relaxation exercises that the karate instructor had taught her.

By fourth grade, Hope's grades had begun to improve. She was actually reading and had learned to harness the amazing auditory recall into a useful tool that worked for her instead of against her. The teachers finally admitting that there might be a problem began to ask her spelling questions orally instead of in a written format.

Unfortunately, the greater emphasis on mathematics now became the enemy. If the answer was 56 she was just as likely to write down 65. If she did this in a problem where the five should be carried, she would of course carry the six. It became a new nightmare. We purchased math programs for the computer at home and she spent hours on drill teaching her fingers and her brain to work together. Whenever she became agitated or frustrated, there was always the relaxation exercise.

This year, Hope entered Junior High. She has learned to control her problem and to work with it to an amazing degree. She has learned to read a clock and has developed organizational strategies that overcome her shortcomings. She has discovered a high degree of talent as an artist that landed her second place in the first contest she ever entered. At twelve, her poise and abilities are often mistaken for a young adult of fifteen. She is on the honor roll and is carrying an overall GPA of 92.71. It wasn't easy, and it isn't over. I just look behind us at all the hurtles we've already overcome and see the ones in front of us as being small in comparison.

That House

"There's that house." It was always the same statement whenever my sister and I hit a certain square of sidewalk on our way to school. Sometimes Lib said it; sometimes, I said it. On those rare occasions when we'd say it together, we'd look at each other with horror and walk a bit faster for fear that she would come out before we were past.

It wasn't that the old Italian woman who lived there had ever done anything that could be interpreted as hostile. In fact, if the truth be known, she ignored us. We were far less interesting to her than the cats that covered her front porch. If you had asked her who we were, she wouldn't have known our names. She wouldn't have cared. She just lived in that house that was five sidewalk squares from the end of the street. The house with all the cats, the vegetable garden that filled the backyard and the porch that needed repaired.

Every day you would see her moving about her vegetable garden with her large heavy arms swaying back and forth as she checked her plants. The huge black skirt she wore dragged on the ground until its hem was shredded. I have no idea what color her hair was since she wore this cotton scarf tied under her chin no matter what the weather. The thing that always drew my attention though was her mustache. It was a real mustache like I saw on the vegetable vender when he came down the street. I asked my mother why she had a mustache one time, but she told me not to ask such things, as it was being unkind.

My sister and I would hold our breath and move quickly past that house hoping that she wouldn't see us. We were convinced that if she did look directly at us that something terrible would happen. Once when I was angry with my mother, I stepped on every crack in the sidewalk and actually stood in front of that house in defiance hoping that she would see me and curse me and my mother. That's the way she always spoke. She would get angry with the milkman and curse him and his mother and his mother's mother in her high pitched Italian accent.

I was in awe of my grandmother. She was not the least bit afraid of the old lady. My four foot eleven inch grandmother would stand on her porch with her neat little apron tied over her perfectly belted housedress and tell her to move on and away. She would have none of her cursing in front of her house. The day that the Italian woman sat on my grandmother's front lawn with a large knife in her hand stabbing out the handfuls of dandelion that grew there was an historical day in our neighborhood. The crowd gathered to see who would come out on top. The crazed Italian lady swore in three languages and brandished her knife above her head like a Turkish Mongol advancing the charge while my grandmother stood her ground with a broom in her hands and ordered her off her front lawn. Nobody, but nobody, was going to dig holes in her lawn. Grumbling in her native language and making odd hand movements in the air, the larger woman backed down and retreated to that house with her pockets full of pilfered dandelion greens.

She could be seen for days coming out on the front porch and staring at my grandmother's lawn with its lovely yellow blooms topping tasty tender greens and plotting. By the weekend, my grandfather had gone out and removed each and every weed from the yard shoving them into a paper sack that he left out for the trashman. The trashman never got it. The sack disappeared in the middle of the night.

Once on a dare, I stepped onto her porch and knocked on the door. My knees were knocking and my heart was beating out of my chest, but I stood my ground and held out my UNICEF can. She opened the door a crack and glared down at me and my little can. She peered over the top of the can in curiosity to see if there was change already in it before shaking her head and shutting the door in my face. That was the closest I ever got to her. She stunk. I don't mean that she was a bad person for not donating to UNICEF. I mean she smelled. There's a peculiar odor about someone who eats raw garlic. It's not just a breath smell. It's a smell that permeates every cell in their body and exudes from every pore. You can stand three feet away from the person and still smell this awful odor that no brand of industrial strength deodorant can remove.

It wasn't long after that she had the fight with the vegetable vender. I always liked him. He would balance his heavy cart filled with fruits and vegetables on its front two wheels like a huge wheelbarrow and come singing down the street. "Apples, peaches, pears and plums. Tell me when your birthday comes." We would all go racing out with our dimes to buy a fresh peach or pear or apple and to hear him tell stories in his highly accented speech. He had this lovely black mustache that bristled when he laughed and he always ruffled the boys' hair and pinched the girls' cheeks. The Italian lady disliked him immensely. One day he called to her in Italian and she yelled back something that made his cheeks turn red. I'm not sure who threw the first tomato, but the vender was doomed to lose. He had only as much ammunition as his cart could hold while she had an entire backyard of tomato plants. To give the man credit, he had much better aim. The street was covered with red splotches of drying seeds before she retreated to her house chattering like a chipmunk.

One day, the house was empty. I'm not even sure when she moved. I told my grandmother, and she grabbed her purse and took my hand to go to the store. She was in such a hurry that she didn't even take off her apron. We walked slowly past the house on that trip to the tea store so that Grandma could check for any signs of life in that house. Later on she would tell me that it was more than the old lady she was looking for. She was convinced that the cats really hung out there because of the rats that lived under the porch. I never saw a rat there, but then again, they never sold the house. After many years, they just tore it down. My grandmother sat out on her front porch and drank her iced tea slowly with a smile on her face as they bulldozed the house into kindling.

That was many years ago, but I still walk down the street and stop on the fifth sidewalk square from the end and think, "There was that house."



Marcia's Favorite Links


Mama's Little Helper
ChiPs Fanfiction Page
KMG 365 Emergency fanzine
La Galeria De Gym Art
The Writer's Garden
Authorlink
New Zealand Collaborative Story
Rinkworks
The Mining Company, wonderful resource for all sorts of things
Writer's Choice Literary Journal
Peanuts Home Page




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