Linda M. Donovan
Executive Director
Linda Donovan graduated from University of Mary Washington with an intense education in French, Italian and Russian. This provided rich ground for understanding words -- their origins, their nuances, the fluency of their sounds. In 1990 Linda resigned from her fifteen-year business career in systems engineering, disaster recovery, and large systems marketing to return to her passion for language. She founded To Write Well to teach the craft of writing with an emphasis on narrative structure and rhetoric.
In 2001 Linda joined a private, online film studio with a large population of writers -- screenwriters, short story writers, novelists -- working in all genres from mainstream to cutting-edge and representing all levels from beginning writers to published authors. From her work there, Linda was awarded top recognition for the quality and tutorial value of her reviews. She also maintained an active, collaborative office for writing and grammar skills.
In 2002 she teamed up with writer and editor, Eric Stark, whose expertise in world literature broadened the scope of her course on rhetoric/style, and by the summer of 2002, they were teaching rhetoric in the classical tradition -- in Linda's words, "a tradition that is NOT the tawdry embellishment of a thesaurus dumped on empty ideas, but the art that expresses ideas clearly and creates 'voice.'"
Linda writes a broad spectrum of fiction and non-fiction. Her most recent publications include Gator Springs Gazette, for which she writes quarterly craft-of-writing book reviews. Her most recent review can be viewed here. In the 2005 Surrey International Writers Storytelling Awards Contest, her story, "The Piano," was awarded Honorable Mention and published in the SIWC Anthology. Her most recent non-fiction work, which focuses on the business professional, can be seen in the upcoming Winter 2005 issue of North Carolina Career Network Magazine in an article entitled "Staying Professional in an Increasingly Casual Workplace" and a related sidebar article, "Eight Traits of a Professional." She is working on three more articles in that series: "Staying Productive from an Office in Your Home;" "The Web of Research: Research your Fiction or Non-Fiction;" and "Overcoming Objections." Her blog, Rhetorically Speaking, presents an on-going series of her personal essays on the ’state of writing’ in our current educational system.
Currently, Linda is also collaborating on a complex novel of transnational intrigue that layers its characters' stories around the notion that mankind's knowledge may not be entirely his own. Most interestingly, although they have worked together for almost four years, Linda has neither met nor spoken with her co-author, who lives thousands of miles away. As a result of their work together however, they have developed a fascinating proficiency in the collaborative process. As her co-author observed:
" It has been a tremendous learning experience apart from the writing itself: implementing security technologies, setting up file servers, developing simple procedures -- we even custom-designed an annotation and editing system that implemented our own style of working together; it was written in javascript and works right on our browser. But the thing we discovered most important, and we realized this very early on, was that we had to develop good manners and clear ideas if it was all going to work. That's what makes collaborators complementary to one another. It was an essential lesson, and our experience working in that way bodes well for the students of To Write Well."
On a personal note, Linda lives on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State with her three collies and three cats.
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Eric J. Stark
Director
Eric is the product of the small town and the big city, of keyboard and pen. After four years at Montana State University, where he studied Computer Science and English Literature, he moved to Denver where he received his MCSE in the spring of 2000. Although Montana is his home, he currently resides in San Francisco, California, where he makes a living in the IT industry by day; by night, he writes and edits fiction, and of course, indulges his passion for reading literature.
His expertise in technology and his background in English allowed him to realize his true calling was not in creating technical documentation or providing user support but in writing fiction and studying literature. Although he had been writing stories since grade school, it was not until he studied rhetoric that he learned it was indeed possible to understand the workmanship that lies under the written forms, i.e., letters, essays, short stories, novels, non-fiction and fiction alike. Where once he only wished he could "write like THAT!," he came to realize it was not only possible, but through work and through experience, eminently achievable.
Based upon his instinct for the balance and structure of language, Linda offered Eric a partnership in To Write Well with their primary goal to bring Impact of Style from a private studio offering to a public offering on its own site. Eric brings a passion for the literature of many cultures and many ages to the study of style, a complement to the foundation of the art of rhetoric. With their combined skills, Impact of Style has reunited the study of literature, composition and speech. This website is both a meeting of minds and a melding of disciplines.
Currently, Eric is active in the IT industry but has returned to his studies of literature through the University of Maryland University College. In the meantime, and in no small measure due to the influence of Impact of Style, his fiction has appeared in The Copperfield Review, The Harrow, and Horrorlibrary.net.
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Edmund R. Schubert
Instructor
Edmund R. Schubert loves stories. Always has; always will. When he was in the second grade, his teacher would bribe him with trips to the library to get him to do his math and science. Little has changed in the ensuing decades.
In the past few years, Edmund has had his short fiction published over thirty times, including an audio production, reprints, and several international publications. He has also published various articles, essays, books reviews and the occasional newspaper column, and in his spare time is the Executive Editor of the regional business magazine North Carolina Career Network.
In 2004 his short story, "Unfathomed," won first prize in the Eighth Annual Lynx Eye Captivating Beginnings Contest, and his story "Reality Check On Register Two" was included in StorySouth's list of Year's Notable Stories. In 2005 his story "I Have To Go Now" was selected for the Writer's Post Journal's annual "Best of…" collection.
Despite all this, Edmund still maintains that his greatest achievement occurred when the underground newspaper he published in college made him the subject of a professor's lecture -- in abnormal psychology.
His personal philosophy is that writing stories is a lot like playing chess. He taught his oldest daughter how the chess pieces move when she was five years old, but that didn't make her a chess player any more than teaching her about plot, character, and dialogue would make her a storyteller. Because the simple truth is: there are stories that live; and there are stories that don't. In storytelling, as in chess, each piece has to come together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Oscar Wilde said, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." To which Edmund adds, "All it takes is looking at the world from a slightly different angle."
Edmund's novel, The Legend of Dreaming Creek, is awaiting publication by a small-press publisher in Pittsburgh.
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