A summary of our June 4, 2009 speaker, Mary Katzke
By Kay Vreeland

Mary Katzke, whose media production company Affinityfilms Inc. completed the documentary “About Face” in January 2009, spoke at the Alaska Professional Communicators luncheon June 4, explaining how the film was made, its story, and its future.

The film’s subject, Gwendellin Bradshaw, was horribly disfigured as a baby after her mentally ill mother threw her into a campfire. At the age of three, the girl lived next door to Katzke. Hearing children’s cries of “roast beef,” Katzke ran outside to find Gwen being pelted with rocks, and rescued her.

So began a long relationship. In crisis at age 24, Gwen decided to tell her story. Over the next five years, Katzke filmed the journey of Gwen’s search for her mother and for healing.

Documentary films are enormously expensive to produce, and it took four and a half years to raise half the budget for this one, said Katzke. A forty-minute segment of the film, completed and shown nationally, helped leverage its Alaskan origins and secured support for the remaining half of the budget within six months.

The film was made using four different video formats, interspersed with old black-and-white 8-mm footage to represent the memory of the injured child.

Now in the distribution phase, “About Face” was on the finalists’ list for Best Mid-Length Documentary at Toronto’s 2009 HotDocs Canadian International Documentary Festival. There are currently 15 requests for screening, across the U.S. as well as in Korea and Australia.

Katzke’s next project is to publish a discussion guide to accompany the film for training those who work with the homeless, the mentally ill, and women with postpartum depression.

Background information about Mary Katzke is on the Web site of Alaska Professional Communicators; the story and trailer of the film are at the “About Face” website.

Student authors tell of Africa trip and other adventures

A summary of our May 7, 2009 speakers, Magical Masks authors from the Home Base After School Program: Mary Rhodes Rasheed, Cecilia Mora Pitts, Randall Wilson – with program coordinator Shirley Mae Springer Staten
by Barbara Brown

On May 7, Alaska Professional Communicators were treated to a slide show and presentation by students from the Home Base After School Program, who recently authored a children’s book and presented it to children in Ghana, Africa. The Home Base program is offered to 4th through 8th graders who live in the Fairview and Muldoon neighborhoods. All students sign a contract that they will remain with the hands-on program for three years.

In polished, well-orchestrated and vivid presentations, the students told us of many adventures, including how they met a U.S. senator, the U.S. ambassador to Ghana, and a man who flew solo around the world. The book they wrote and the trip they took to Ghana are outlined here, so I will give you some of the extra impressions the students shared.

Mary Rhodes Rasheed, one of the first Home Base students to sign on, showed off yet another of their projects: “If I Could Change the World” posters. Mary’s called for “No Smoking.” Later, she shared her poem, “Dream to Reality.”

Cecilia Mora Pitts recited her poem “The Sky Is the Limit,” and explained that Magical Masks, their book, had been conceived simply as a gift to bring the children of Africa.

Randall Wilson described the expectations he had of Africa, fostered by the media in this country. He expected small villages, sad faces and ill and hungry children. Instead, he found happy kids and big cities, but he did find poverty, too. Kids didn’t have shoes, and their schools were so poorly equipped, the benches designed to hold two students had to hold four. The only technology in the classroom: a chalkboard. He also found it was so hot, he couldn’t breathe at first!

In a visit to “the slave castle”—a castle in Cape Coast, Ghana, used as dungeons in the slave trade—the students heard that pregnant women had been thrown overboard, that slaves could exercise only once or twice a week, and that if they broke into a sweat, they were returned to the dungeon. A sign over the castle door read “Door of No Return,” because once captives left, they would board boats never to return to their homeland. When the Home Base students entered, they felt that there is finally another sign: “Door of Return.”

Cecilia was profoundly moved by her visit to an orphanage. There were no diapers; they used rags and safety pins. The Home Base kids provided sanitizer, but even bathing the babies in tubs with reused water felt unhygienic to the students. They experienced the difficulties of hauling water to make the day’s porridge. But they gave out stickers to the kids and were surprised when the kids pasted them all over their faces.

To arrive at the end of their journey, a village on stilts in the south of Ghana, they all had to take off their shoes and wade out into “hot, gooey water.” Finally, Strong Young African Men (Shirley Mae’s words) took them in canoes through the forest. The village will be the beneficiary of some of the proceeds from the sale of Magical Masks, and the village chief wondered how anyone had even heard they existed.

The students saw elephants, wart hogs—and even got into horseplay with baboons. But the real impact of the trip? Randall said he’d take his own education more seriously and pray for the kids in Africa. What a testimony to the wonderful work Shirley Mae Springer Staten has done as the director of the program. She took kids out of Fairview and gave them the world!

Shirley Mae Springer Staten

Editor shares pleasures, pains of anthologizing
by Joan Tovsen

At the Alaska Professional Communicators’ March 5 luncheon, speaker Michael Engelhard suggested his compulsion to assemble and edit anthologies might be a psychological disorder of his own creation – one he fondly calls “anthromania.” The latest symptom was Engelhard’s most recent publication, just released from the University of Alaska Press (2009): Wild Moments: Adventures with Animals of the North. This follows the 2005 anthology, Unbridled: The Western Horse in Fiction and Nonfiction, and Redrock Almanac: Canyon Country Vignettes (2007).

Engelhard moved from his native Germany to Alaska at age 30. He finished his degree in anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks but realized he much preferred the wilds of wilderness to pushing papers in an office or classroom. His anthology obsession grew out of his experience as a river guide, telling and sharing stories to entertain clients. Earlier publications include two river guide journals turned into story form: Where the Rain Children Sleep: A Sacred Geography of the Colorado Plateau and Hell’s Half Mile: River Runners’ Tales of Hilarity and Misadventure.

He now spends his days guiding and writing in Alaska and the Colorado Plateau.

Publishers consider anthologies challenging to sell and generally do not offer very much compensation to the writers or the editor, Engelhard told our group. But for him, the pleasure of assembling a collection outweighs the pain. The pleasures of anthologies, he points out, include the challenge of compositing 33 animal stories by 33 writers into one book. The composite combines experiences of multiple life times, permitting a combination of various styles, beyond the reach of one writer. The result is what musicians call an antiphony of voices. The editor of a good anthology selects the voices and stories that complement each other, as harmonious music, and sets them to a score of order.

One thing he appreciates about anthologies, said Engelhard, is that the collections can fulfill roles that other publication venues do not, providing a forum for stories that may not quite fit anywhere else.
For example, an anthology can be a good place for an author to put one’s stories of personal humiliations to good use. This is what Engelhard did with his own story of a first date on an Alaska river paddle trip. In the story, Engelhard recalled his show-off manner, and how he carelessly left paddles on the beach where the water carried them away. The ill-fated couple still had three days to go down river – with only surrogate paddles made from tree branches and drift wood. They have never spoken since that trip, he confessed. Yet, a story too funny and long for a magazine to accept was written – and wove its way into anthology.

Anthologies, Engelhard has learned, can be nearly as difficult to sell as poetry. In publishing circles, such collections are known for being slow out of the gate. But they are also known to carry some long-term value, since they tend to backlist rather than disappear.

One challenge of editing a collection, said Engelhard, is getting the writers and publisher to sign on to a project, since each generally wants to know who else is involved before making a commitment. Writers want assurance they are signing with a known publisher, and publishers want to know what big-name authors have signed on. University presses are most likely to publish anthologies, because they are subsidized and not concerned with profits. However, in most cases, publishing advances are small or nonexistent and the budget may barely cover payments to contributing writers. A typical scenario: a $3,500 payment must be divided among 33 writers, with no promise of any future income from the publication.

Despite the apparently low dividends, being in an anthology can be a good opportunity for a writer, said Engelhard, providing a venue in which new writers may rub shoulders with the big names. Though print runs are generally fewer than 1,000, collections may be reprinted if they sell well.

Our speaker entertained the gathering through the rest of lunch with some unique food for thought in a reading from another anthology, Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers by Laura Pritchett (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). After this, he took questions and shared insights and inspirational stories from Wild Moments.

Click for more about Michael Engelhard’s thoughts on anthologies.

Michael Egelhard

December 2006: Bradfield & Broadsided Press
by Carolyn Rinehart

Our December speaker, Elizabeth Bradfield, is an innovator, so it seems fitting that she is the first to have her talk digitally recorded. Jerami Marsh, a new student member from UAA who did the recording, checked the video and audio after the Dec. 7 luncheon and reported that it was of good quality.

He plans to edit the movie, taking out “dead space and bloopers,” and insert slides from the show Liz presented. He hopes to have it posted in a week or so (about Dec. 14), but said this first one may take a little longer.

A link to the video will be on the APC website. The recording is intended for anyone interested, but especially for our out-of-Anchorage members, including student members in Fairbanks. There will be a low-quality video for dialup internet users and a high-quality version for broadband users.

Something’s missing from our streets and public bulletin boards, and Liz Bradfield wants to put it back.

It’s the broadside. Common in past centuries, these single sheets were posted in towns across the nation. They carried announcements, advertisements, political commentary, song lyrics, cartoons, and poems. They encouraged thought and public discourse.

They championed the cause of a woman’s right to vote, and they provided a place for the early “beat” poets to get their poems read. Some current poets, such as Adrienne Rich, issue illustrated broadsides of their poems that are framed in galleries and sell for hundreds of dollars.

Believing that the on-street broadside has a place in today’s world, Bradfield started Broadsided Press a year ago with the goal of putting art and literature on the streets.

One broadside a month appears on the site, each with an original poem and artwork to illustrate it. Writers e-mail their work to the press. Once Bradfield and her co-editor Mark Temelko have selected a piece for publication, she sends it out to her stable of 21 artists, and the first one to request the right to illustrate that poem gets it.

One of the first poems to be published was “Green,” by APC member Linda McCarriston, now living in Fairbanks. It’s one of the most frequently downloaded, Bradfield said. Other titles include “Sketch of an Astronaut” and “Edison in Love.”

For distribution, Bradfield, who lives in Anchorage, relies on her “vectors”—friends of the site in cities and towns across the nation. The vectors download the broadsides, print, and post them. Vectors are in 25 states at present, plus Canada, England, and Germany.

No money changes hands; the site exists purely for the love of literature and art, Bradfield said. Her only costs are her time and the cost of web hosting for the site, about $40 per year. (She’s exploring some money-making opportunities from it, however.)

Bradfield’s background prepared her for her grassroots publication venture. She is a recognized poet whose works have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, the anthology Best New Poets 2006,and other outlets. A graduate of the University of Alaska Anchorage with a fine arts degree, she did collaborative work with artists at the Vermont Studio Center.

She acquired Web experience through doing editorial work for Moms Online, a parenting website, in the 1990s. She particularly liked developing the online community of mothers, which gave her the idea for the artists’ and writers’ community of Broadsided Press.

Bradfield is also a Web designer and a naturalist. Her firm, Pelagic Design, creates websites to swim in the “open ocean” of the internet.

She wants to see Broadsided Press grow, and perhaps her talk to APC will help her do that.

Craciun says “Every vote matters”
by Mariah Oxford

Jean Craciun, sociologist and market researcher, took time away from her 8-day-old daughter to address Alaska Press Women at its November luncheon, just a few days before the election that had everyone talking.

Craciun provided her insights into the race, as well as predictions for how she thought it would turn out.

“I have great respect for communicators and journalists,” she told those gathered. “You present information in an unbiased, neutral, and fair way – and that’s some of what I’ve been doing in my career.”
Craciun has been in Alaska 26 years and began her business when she purchased the research division of Rick Mystrom’s ad agency in 1989.

Since then she’s worked during a lot of big campaigns, including for Wally Hickel, Arliss Sturgelewski, Tony Knowles, and Fran Ulmer.
During the 2006 election season, she’s been working for a lot of outside groups, from California to Michigan and Ohio. Yet everywhere she went in Alaska, people kept asking her, “What’s going to happen?” in the local races.

“Once critical mass was reached, I said I’d do a poll,” she said. Their poll was the first released before the primary, and according to Craciun, “We called it as it ended up.”

Regarding the Alaska state governor’s race, she noted that it would be a “very close race – it’s all about who shows up.”
“It will come down to each person’s vote,” she said. Her poll showed Knowles and Palin neck and neck with 43% each. Craciun indicated that she didn’t think Andrew Halcro would be a spoiler because he would get some votes from Republicans and some from Democrats.

Rather, she predicted, it would be the swing voters that would help decide the election. Who are they? “Honest, open, inclusive; they want elected officials that look, think and act as they do. They want a person you’d trust your kid to be picked up by from the toddler preschool. They value community involvement, have simple values of doing for oneself and being responsible for what they said.”
She said the race would come down to how much someone is impacted by what they saw in the Daily News, on a tv ad, or what they heard a friend say at a dinner party.

“Every single vote will matter this time, even more so than in the past.”

Regarding the race for U.S. Representative, Craciun predicted that Don Young would win, even though Diane Benson would make a good showing. “It won’t be enough to make a big difference.”

Craciun also talked a bit about a survey she had conducted on global warming for the National Science Foundation. One of the questions asked participants to rank different factors according to their levels of risk to American society. For Alaskans, terrorism was first, followed by the Iraq war and then global warming. However, Craciun noted that some Alaskans were in favor of global warming, with better weather and more tourism. “Some people want development and environmental conservation – the ‘I want it all’ group.”

Throughout her address, Craciun brought out the fascinating complexity of surveys and the factors that affect what people think at any given time. After answering a few questions, Craciun excused herself to be in the company of the person whose opinion she probably cares most about right now — her baby girl, Ana Sophia.

More about Jean Craciun

As a sociologist, Jean Craciun has researched every issue critical to Alaskans over the past 20 years — from global warming to subsistence to the urban-rural divide. Her company also does extensive work in marketing.

In 1989, Craciun founded her own research company, Craciun Research Group. Focus group research is one of Craciun’s specialties. She’s also regarded as an expert in surveying Alaska Natives and other indigenous peoples.

Jean Craciun

Bestselling author shares secrets to self-promotion
by Laurel Downing Bill

Master gardener, photographer, entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author Marion Owen told those attending the Alaska Press Women luncheon on May 4 that they needed to beat their own drums to get the word out about their work. Born and raised on Puget Sound in Washington State, Owen likened the process of promotion to walks along the beach in search of shells with her father when she was a young girl.

“Just keep turning over those rocks,” she told the audience he would tell her. “Your answers are going to come.”

Owen, who co-authored “Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul,” then offered seven “answers” to how journalists can help promote themselves.

1. With around 3,000 advertising messages bombarding a person on any given day, it is important to make your message stand out from the rest.

“It isn’t being louder,” said Owen, a current resident of Kodiak. “But being real and honest.”

2. Remember the Cajun word “lagniappe,” which means “a little bit extra.”

Owen said that appealing to emotion rather than intellect is most effective, so one-on-one communication is key to successful promotion. And, she said, always refer to yourself.

“The most important word is ‘you,’” said Owen, who practices what she preaches in her published articles, the UpBeet Gardener newsletter, her award-winning UpBeet Gardener radio show and on her plantea.com Web site.

3. Anyone in business should have a Web site, even if it’s only a one-page business card. Good designs include a banner across the top, navigation along the left side, and the center, or “prime real estate,” filled with important information. The right side is a “call to action” area where visitors can click to buy your product or service. Testimonials fit there, too.

“It’s like the letter Z,” she said. “It takes three seconds to ask, ‘Am I in the right place?’”

4. Look for hooks and unusual angles in your promotion, because the Broca area of the brain, which is involved in language and processing speech, is pounded with messages all the time. It doesn’t let just anything in.

“We think we’re visual creatures, but we hear words audio – the ear is next to the Broca area,” Owen said. “Words sound like something you recognize: ‘lips that taste like wine.’”

She said try to think of something so unusual to promote yourself that one will ask, “why didn’t I think of that.” Like the pet rock.

5. Use press releases – they are the unsung heroes of self-promotion. Owen said two-thirds of the copy in the New York Times now comes from press releases.

A few tips to make great releases include:

• Keep them 1-2 pages
• Have a hook
• Remember your audience
• Tell the story you want told

“Press releases level the playing field,” Owen said. “Keep it personal. It’s about people telling stories about people to people.”

She also stressed that “keeping it personal” translates to mailing out information about you and your service, too. Hand write addresses on envelopes and affix a postage stamp.

“Building relationships is key,” she said.

6. Stay in touch with retailers, suppliers, customers, the media and the world. The most powerful thing to have is a mailing list. Keep track of your contacts.

If you have a large number of e-mails to send out, split them up by categories. Use a newsletter/mailing list host service to help. Owen suggested two Web sites:

• Sparklist
• Constant Contact

“Remember, you are taking somebody’s time,” said Owen. She added that it is necessary to promote oneself daily.

“Just do five things a day. Five phone calls, five letters, five e-mails,” she said.

Owen concluded her presentation with helpful tips that included wearing eyeglasses in the shower to get them clean and replacing pasta with shredded green and red cabbage to lose 15 pounds.

The humorist business entrepreneur said that by using the latest high-tech communications, combined with one-on-one communication, Alaska’s press women can get “ink” in any media out there.

Owen is available to do in-depth marketing workshops. She can be reached at: P.O. Box 1694, Kodiak, AK 99615, (907) 486-2500, or marion@ptialaska.net.

Marion Owen

The making of a radio show
by Diane Walters

Every Saturday morning at 10, if you tune in to KSKA, 91.1 on your radio dial, you can hear an eclectic mix of news, poetry, and feature stories from Alaska’s Public Radio Network. Called AK and produced by Jessica Cochran, the weekend show is now in its third year. Although it airs at 10 a.m. in Anchorage, the time varies depending on where you live in the state.

Cochran explained how AK came into being and how they go about putting together each episode at the February luncheon. She said the money to produce a show came from a three-year grant around four or five years ago. The staff at APRN came up with the idea of producing a weekend show. To determine the show’s content, they asked member stations what type of programming they wanted. It takes about 10 stories to fill a one hour show.

The program started broadcasting Oct. 23, 2003, and is in its last year of the grant. They also have underwriters and smaller peripheral grants to help keep the show going, and they are officially affiliated with Alaska Public Television Inc., which includes KSKA public radio and KAKM public television.

Each week the show has a theme or an issue. “Some are literal, like ‘Nuclear North’ and some are more open to interpretation, such as ‘Lost,’ which could be literally or emotionally,” Cochran said.

The show operates under five basic principles according to Cochran. The first is geographic diversity. “Although we’re based in Anchorage, we try not to be an Anchorage-centric show,” she said.

To get a state-wide feel, they use reporters from around the state, free lance reporters, and they send staff reporters out. The show also has a “300 Village” segment, in which they interview residents of several of the villages over the phone each week.

The second principle said Cochran is to use personal stories, which ties in with the third principal of trying to involve other people in the show than just the four staff members. Although they mostly work with station-based reporters and free lancers, she said they are always looking for more people. They work with the students at the Alaska Teen Media Institute, and when people submit essays or poems, she said they try to get the authors to come on the show to read their work.

“UAA professors make it a class assignment to send us stuff,” she added. “We’ve also tried some funky ways to get others involved. We had a joke contest and got two entries, and then we had a poetry contest, and got a 100. We chose four or five and invited the authors to come on the show to read their poems.

“We can’t pay, but we can offer fame,” she said.

Connecting to the wider world even though the show’s emphasis in on Alaska is the fourth principle, Cochran said. They co-hosted one show with the Canadian Broadcast Company based in Whitehorse during Alaska-Canada Week. “There is an Alaska-Canada Week,” she said, in case we didn’t know. She said the CBC in Whitehorse often runs more stories from Alaska than from their Canadian neighbors.

The fifth principle is to have fun, and if you’ve ever listened to AK, you can tell that the staff truly enjoys their work.

About Cochran

Jessica Cochran grew up listening to NPR in Washington D.C. She moved north and west to attend college at MacAlester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She continued her northwest journeyt o Alaska in 1996. Cochran has work for APRN for 10 years. As a reporter, she’s covered topics ranging from the annual silliness of Seward’s Polar Bear Jump Off festival to the struggles of Alaska schools working to meet new federal education standards. She served for several years as producer of APRN’s Iditarod coverage, periodically produces Alaska News Nightly, and most recently served as producer of APRN’s statewide call-in show, Talk of Alaska. Her off-duty interests include hiking, cross-country skiing and traveling.

Jessica Cochran