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Westcliffe author Annie Dawid is always on the go
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Photographer and fiction author, Annie Dawid lives in Westcliffe. Her books include York Ferry (second printing, Cane Hill Press, 1993), LILY IN THE DESERT (University Press, 2001), and her last published work, AND DARKNESS WAS UNDER HIS FEET: STORIES OF A FAMILY (Litchfield Review Press/Booksurge, 2008), which won the Litchfield Press Award for Short Fiction in 2007. AND DARKNESS WAS UNDER HIS FEET: STORIES OF A FAMILY will be reviewed next month in Jewish Book World. Dawid will also be doing readings from DARKNESS at the Mizel Museum in Denver in March; at Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania in April; and at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Portland, OR in May. Her photos have appeared in several literary magazines, and she had a story of September 11, 2001 that was published in Glimmer Train Stories (winter 2007), and won a prize in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open. She has also done reviews for The Oregonian and the Jewish Review. She currently writes columns for the Denver Post’s “Colorado Voices” series, and reviews books for High Country News.
When she’s not writing, Dawid is teaching literature to the AP English students at Custer County High School. Her recent venue of writing workshops included schools in Colorado Springs and Fountain Valley, as well as the LaVeta Library, CSU Pueblo and Colorado Springs Community College. She also has a weekend workshop planned for the Taos Summer Writer’s Conference. To make ends meet for herself and her ten year old son, Dawid also works at a coffee shop; edits manuscripts; proofreads; types data for a local non-profit; and works individually with writers who pay for editing services on a per hour or per page basis.
In addition to all of that, Dawid is the founder of Bloomsbury West Writer’s Retreat, which is a one bedroom mountain hamlet, near Silvercliffe, where writers can write, think contemplate or meditate at an elevation of 7,980 feet, with no television or Internet access to disturb the solitude, (although access is available within walking distance). Dawid also makes herself available for tutorials in fiction and essay writing. When asked about the inspiration for this creative retreat Dawid says,
“In graduate school I spent a semester in London, studying the
Bloomsbury Group. I loved the idea of having a place for making art
and literature in which everything -- the walls, fabric, furniture --
was art. The Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, her sister
Vanessa Bell, painter Duncan Grant, art critic Roger Fry and many
others, was a place in which creative minds came together and made
art. My Bloomsbury West is not for groups but for individuals to come
and do their work in an inspirational environment. During the last two
years, many writers, artists and songwriters have spent fruitful time
at BBW.”
Inspiration in the past has come through friends and family, for example,
“My story "Faith," the first in my collection, LILY IN THE DESERT, is about a couple whose
older daughter is murdered. I knew a couple who had only one child, who was murdered
at 21, and I imagined what it would have been like had there been a sibling. The story is
told from a younger sibling's point of view.”
However, more recent works have taken a different turn, with Dawid having no personal connection to her last (as yet unpublished) work, which is a purely research writing about the Jonestown Massacre, or to her current novel-in-progress, about a Jewish Scholar in World War II that ended up teaching in all black colleges in the Jim Crow south. Dawid’s advice for new writers is, “Read, read, read. And write, write, write. Then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Subscribe to the magazines you want to be published in. Don't give up.”
Dawid was born in New York, but has lived most of her life in the west. Although she spent fifteen years in Oregon, teaching at Lewis & Clark College, she had fallen in love with Westcliffe while taking a weekend break from graduate school at the University of Denver, and she returned to spend her summers and sabbaticals there.
“I fell in love with the sky, clouds, open space, weather, and mountains… In 2004, during
my second sabbatical, and after I had bought a cabin at 9100 feet in the Wets, I decided
to make the break and leave academia. I've been very happy since!”
Readers can look forward to her current historical novel-in-progress, which has the working title, STANDING BESIDE LOVE, from a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. "Standing beside love is always justice." This work promises to be a classic drama, with the story of an impossible love woven into a tale that, “begins with the bombing of the Atlanta synagogue in 1958 and ends at the Civil Rights march on Washington in 1963.”
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