Making Noise in the Library — An Author’s Gala in Walnut Creek

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I like a party. No two ways about it. I love to talk. And I love to eat and drink, especially when the food and company are as delicious as those on offer Saturday night at the annual Walnut Creek Library Foundation’s Authors Gala, held in the beautiful Walnut Creek Library. Yes, in the library.

It was fun bumping into people I know and don’t know. Lisa Wrenn was there — she was my editor at the Oakland Tribune when I was writing the columns about life with little kids, husband, house and commute. Many of those columns are republished, with permission, on this website.

Lisa was a writer’s dream of an editor. I’d come to work on a Monday morning with a sliver of

an idea for that week’s column. I’d try my idea out on Lisa, who also had small children. If Lisa laughed, I knew my idea was good to go.

Also at the library party Saturday night: Don Lattin, who was the religion reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle for years and years and the author, most recently, of  “Changing Our Minds: Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy.” Don wrote the foreword to my book “Wrestling with God: Stories of Doubt and Faith.” It’s an insightful read even if you don’t get any further than that into my book.

Somebody I didn’t know till Saturday night is Robert Aquinas McNally. We shared an author’s table at the library gala. His latest book is “The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age.” I’m going to study it and get some ideas on how to write historical narrative. (I’m hoping to write about my three-times great-grandmother who had the enigmatic — Dutch? Indonesian? — name: Bandenah.)

Bob is also a prizewinning poet. Find out for yourself at this YouTube video recorded at the Mt. Diablo Unitarian Universalist Church a couple of years ago.

I also had a chance to get myself photographed with the famous memoirist Joyce Maynard, who lives in the East Bay, like so many of the writers partying with impunity at the library on Saturday night.

Jon, the thriller-writer at our house, scored a couple of writing tips from Joyce before he snapped the photo.

I always get super nervous before these author  events. But I always wind up having fun. It’s a mystery.

More author events at “How Three World War II POWs Saved Each Other’s Lives.”  Also, “I Landed a Bit Part in a Real Movie. Thank You, Armistead Maupin.”