Joe Ide returns to the SCWC for San Diego 36 with his sixth novel, a departure from his critically–lauded, award-winning series tracking the life of private investigator Isaiah Quintabe, which includes IQ (New York Times Critics’ Best of the Year and winner of the Anthony, Macav[Click For The Rest...]

Hailed by Publishers Weekly as, “A dark but ultimately hopeful sci-fi exploration of the threats faced by queer people of color [and] a love letter to immigrant culture and the power people have to save each other … a beautiful, satisfying story of redemption and families of cho[Click For The Rest...]

Do you remember the 21st night of September? Love was changin’ the minds of pretenders While chasin’ the clouds away So sang the great Earth, Wind & Fire on “September,” the joyful R&B affirmation released in 1978. September 21, 2019, Saturday evening special guest[Click For The Rest...]

What a weekend. Fully one year since our 2020 ground conference we transitioned to a cloud event and got to see so many invaluable members of our community, it was a bit overwhelming. By all accounts exceeding expectations that we could emulate our traditional events so successfully o[Click For The Rest...]

Chronicling time during COVID-19 is a muddle without minutes, absent hours, smearing days and months into an unfathomable fog of baleful recollection. That is to say, what I’m certain occurred months ago, actually took place only weeks past, if not last Tuesday. The timeline skewed in[Click For The Rest...]

Today’s guest blogger is Rick Ochocki, longtime associate, now associate director, of the SCWC. 450,000 people started a novel for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in 2018, and 53,000 entered the Winner’s Circle, writing at least 50,000 new words of an original work of fiction[Click For The Rest...]

And we’re off! Off-site, that is. Given there’s zero evidence to suggest we can safely gather physically come February, our 35th annual San Diego event will be conducted online. We’ve researched our options and the consensus among staff is that we can emulate the best of our in-person[Click For The Rest...]

Christine Ann Barnett died early on a Friday evening, June of 2020, in the thick of a plague from which she was mercifully spared. Co-director of the Southern California Writers’ Conference, she was petrified of dying. Her word, petrified. When she told me over the phone, from a hospi[Click For The Rest...]

These are hard times for too many, hemmed in, strung out. Anxious. Chrissie, Wes, Rick, Linda and I had tried to glom onto some hope that our fall conference could take place as usual. Given the current phased opening failures in regaining some semblance of normalcy, we cannot in good[Click For The Rest...]

To call our current surreality unnerving is an understatement. Seems people in every walk of life are petrified. Friends. Family. Familiar strangers we’ve never taken time to learn about. Those we glance past. All face an existential threat not of our making, and largely beyond [Click For The Rest...]