EXCITED ANNOUNCEMENT: HERE'S TO ELIZABETH MCBRIDE!

Dear Friends:

Sort of a Birthing...
The only thing on my creative mind this week is that we are launching my dear friend Elizabeth's memoir:

LAST OF THE NICE GIRLS:
How a Nice Girl from the British Empire
Ends up a Witch in the New Mexico Desert
A Memoir by Elizabeth McBride (1933-2004)

Green Phoenix Productions, An Imprint of Amador Publishers, LLC
ISBN: 978-0-938513-38-4
[568 pp, 8 pp b&w photaes, $28.95/£14.77]
Publication date May/June 2007

This is Green Phoenix Production's first publication (our first CD was Rick Allen's "Inconstant Bard" in 2002), this launches us as a PUBLISHERon planet Earth, and I am very excited! (This is Part 3,456,709 of my Creative Goals and Dreams!!)

All that scribbling...
Editorially, I am now culling lists of all her friends in Scotland and the UK and sending them letters to announce the book, hoping to meet them along the way...planning book parties in New Mexico (from Scotland), taking book orders, receiving happy emails from her friends who were out there waiting...and waiting...and waiting...after all, everyone saw her scribbling away all her life in those diaries she carried everywhere!

Please go see!
Please drop by the Green Phoenix Productions website and find the LAST OF THE NICE GIRLS page to read all about it, including excerpts from the book and beautiful photaes of her life, reviews and ordering information. We have an EARLY BIRD SPECIAL, a 10% discount on orders before May 1st.

A little history...
Elizabeth and I met in 1995 when she started a wee writing workshop in Jemez Springs, New Mexico. From then til 2003, she and three other women writers and I met every month, faithfully, to share our books-in-progress and critique and cheer each other on as writers. Elizabeth was always working on her memoir, bringing in bits and pieces. Her life history was so exotic to me, covered so many countries, timeframes, moments in history! Yet it was so very much about a woman's interior...very familiar, funny and sad.

My brilliant team...
When she knew she was dying of breast cancer, she hurried to finish the memoir (based on a lifetime of intimate/intricate diaries spanning the 1940s-weeks before her death in 2004) and left me in charge of doing the final culling, editing and publication. Since 2004 I have been working on this book and then, in 2005, brought in her adult son Ramon Berguer and her companion Noel Sorrell and my cohort in publishing, Zelda Gatuskin (a most amazing woman!!!) to get this to the press. It's there now...my brother Lyle L. Miller did the cover...I could go on and on about the fantastic editorial team and how we have accomplished this mostly via email!!!!! Not to forget Rita Bates, Rick Allen's sister (my forever sister-in-law-and-love) in Wisconsin who has been working on putting together the new website pages, hours and hours of brilliant creative genius...all for love...

I am very grateful tonight for the brilliant, good, intense, dedicated people who have helped Elizabeth's dream come true. And I know she is at my shoulder, along with Rick, and is very very proud.

So please go take a look and garner some inspiration - because all Elizabeth cared about at the end was that other writers (women in particular) would have the courage to write.

Coming Next Month...
In April we have a real treat in store here at the Workshop/Salon, we're going to get Very Serious About Art....oh no, I ain't tellin'! More on that later!

For now...
I raise a wee glass of single malt (let's make it the one called Superstition, from the Isle of Jura, where there is a writer's colony) in Rick Allen's pewter flask, a toast to an incredible, elegant and courageous woman I was so privileged to know...and to a book that was her life's work...and her life. And is now her gift to us all.

DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND LOVE WHAT YOU DO!

Michelle Miller Allen

(PLEASE ACCESS MY WEBSITE VIA GOOGLE OR YOUR FAVORITE BROWSER...BLOGSPOT.COM IS CURRENTLY HAVING TROUBLE WITH LINKS BEING REROUTED TO PORN SITES, ETC. GEESH! HOPE THEY FIX THAT QUICK!)

www.greenphoenixproductions.com