News From the Author

The festival’s panel, From Pen to Print, on The Blue Ridge Anthology, features selections from Piedmont Virginia authors. Local radio host and author Coy Barefoot opened the panel by reading from his new book on Thomas Jefferson’s lessons in leadership, followed by Hilda Ward, poet and Albemarle’s Artist in Residence with her reflections on Hurricane Katrina. Sarah Honenberger entertained the packed house with her story on a writer’s life in ‘A Myriad of Mugratroyds.’ Randolph Macon Professor Jack Trammel read his poem, La Tolteca, the Virginia Writer’s Club 2006 state poetry winner. Baldacci, Dove, Barefoot, and Garrett’s stories were included in the anthology by invitation along with juried selections from other local writers in all three genres. The session will be replayed on Charlottesville’s Channel 10; watch here for dates and times, along with the replay of Honenberger’s other March 22 Festival appearance, Political Intrigues in Fiction. The political controversy over vaccine safety and mandates remains in the news with national opposition from parents, health care officials, and some legislators to yet another mandatory vaccine without adequate testing.

The scandal grows: Drug company money buys votes in Virginia among women legislators who ought to be protecting their female children instead of linking their school attendance to an expensive and virtually untested vaccine by ‘labeling’ it a cervical cancer vaccine’ when it has no such guarantee. When will parents take up the cause and demand the whole truth from vaccine manufacturers before they inject their daughters with more medicine with unknown and untested risks. Even the manufacturers say that the vaccine may well have lost its potency by the time the 11-12 year olds who must now be vaccinated reach the age where the risk of HPV is the greatest. We have a year to repeal this legislation. Read and educate yourselves and your friends and let your legislators know that you object to another mandatory vaccination that punishes girls for being female.

The question of how to publicize political issues that effect your personal and professional life will be subject of my presentation at the state convention of the Business and Professional Women’s Club in Williamsburg on May 18. Parents everywhere are blogging and writing to their congressmen and women about the mandatory vaccine lobbying by Merck for gardasil. The controversy over tying vaccinations to school attendance infuriates Americans. See www.livelywomen.com for the ongoing scope of parental reactions or write here what do you think as parents about yet another mandatory vaccine.

Our friends in Vero Beach connected me with the Radio Rhett, talk show host to the stars. On Wednesday March 7 he interviewed me. We talked books, politics, opera and movies. Warm, friendly fellow, inquisitive and fun. By the time I went back to Book Center in Vero downtown, they had customers calling about White Lies. Publicity works. Thank you radio listeners and readers.