Previous Featured Authors Archive | Published Writers of Rossmoor

Marianne Gage

Born in rural Oklahoma and later traveling west to the multi-cultural environs of the California Bay Area, Marianne Gage encounters a profusion of notable personalities: a famous cartoonist, an art professor, several well-known actors (including one musical comedy star), a presidential candidate, a young black revolutionary, a celebrated blind pianist, a jazz musician, and many more. Some of these meetings are pleasant and friendly; others are blundering and gauche. But they all add up to a lifetime of noteworthy experiences spanning the 20th century and leading into the 21st. In the final chapter, Gage and her husband host a fantasy party with all the luminaries in attendance, both living and dead. Noel Coward meets Huey Newton, Maria Tallchief gets to know Mercedes Ruehl, and a good time is had by all.

Marianne Gage has published The Wind Came Running, The Putneyville Fables, All Kinds of Beauty, and The Quirky Kids of Sunshine Hollow. Gage, a former teacher in the Oakland public schools, is a portrait artist and printmaker. She was married for sixty-eight years to San Francisco illustrator Ed Diffenderfer. She now lives in Rossmoor.

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Twila Slesnick

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Twila Slesnick is an unlikely memoirist, but some years ago, when her father first opened up about his experience as a Japanese language interpreter during WWII, she dove right in.

Shortly on the heels of that endeavor, she discovered that her father-in-law, William Freund, also had an amazing WWII story to tell. So she dove in again. The result this time, was his memoir (as told to Slesnick), Take Me Back to the Bloody 100th. The book chronicles Bill's journey from indifferent high school student to eager member of the Army Medical Corps and then, improbably, to pilot trainee. Next came the war and Bill's assignment to the Bloody 100th Bomb Group. His adventures did not end there, and his sometimes hilarious and sometimes terrifying escapades captivated Slesnick and inspired her to set his stories to paper. Slesnick was not new to writing when she took on those projects, although much of her writing was of a different sort. She spent her high school years in New Delhi, India. Upon graduations, she reluctantly left the subcontinent for college. While in graduate school at UC Berkeley, she co-authored mathematics curriculum materials for both teachers and students, and wrote for academic journals.

Once she left academia, she became a partner in a legal, accounting and investment firm in San Francisco. During that time, she wrote an investment newsletter and has authored a number of books for Nolo Press in the area of retirement planning. Slesnick has recently joined PWR, as well as the Rossmoor Writers group, and is enjoying the friendly and supportive nature of both groups.

She still returns *home* to India from time to time.

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Phyllis Wachob

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Phyllis Wachob is a relatively new member of PWR. At her first meeting, she introduced herself as a writer of cozy mysteries. Cozy mysteries are considered “gentle” books, no graphic violence, no profanity, and no explicit sex. Most often, the crime takes place “off stage” and the victim was a nasty character who badly treated others. The main character, usually a woman, is always very likeable and smarter than the local police. Think of Jessica Fletcher in the TV series, Murder She Wrote - she typifies the heroine in a cozy mystery.

Cozy mysteries have become a booming business. Many cozy mystery readers are intelligent women looking for a “fun read” that engages the mind. The main characters in Wachob’s books are both women: one a retired school librarian and the other a ditzy English teacher. Mysteries and dead bodies seem to follow both these heroines, whether they are in exotic places or in their own backyards.

Phyllis Wachob grew up in the Central Valley of California. As a child, she loved to read and use her imagination. After college at UC Santa Cruz, she began a life of travel and adventure, studying for an MA in England, traveling by bicycle through France and Italy, followed by busing through Greece and Turkey. She then became a full-time traveler and writer, spending a year in India, followed by a year traveling in Africa. She has continued to travel throughout her life and has, to date, traveled to 80 countries.

When she was teaching English in China, she fell in love with the wild scenery and peoples of Chinese Turkestan. She subsequently lived in Japan, Taiwan, Australia (where she earned a Doctorate of Education in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), China, Singapore, Egypt and Turkey, teaching and traveling. These extensive experiences are reflected in her mystery novels in the Teachers Abroad Mystery series. She took her knowledge of the people, places, food and customs and wove fictional stories of mystery and murder.

Although she started with the Nancy Drew mysteries, Wachob has been influenced by the great mystery writers, enjoying Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s books, among others. She believes that characters and their vicissitudes form the crux of mysteries and the motivation to solve the whodunit is the driver of the story. The colorful, exotic, and unfamiliar should draw the reader into the core of the mystery, while the mundane and conventional hold the keys to the solution.

Wachob currently lives in Walnut Creek, where she recently moved from Bakersfield. Her newest series, the Kern Kapers Mysteries, is set in Bakersfield and environs and features the characters who live there. The first in the series has just been made into an audio book and fans can now listen to the heroine, Vermilion Blew, tell her own story of in Body in the Orchard.

A member of the California Writers Club, Wachob benefits from the connections of this professional writing community. She is currently working on a non-fiction book tentatively entitled Exploring Chinese Turkestan: Following in the Footsteps of Marco Polo. Phyllis has visited the region eight times over a period of thirty years. The latter- day Marco Polo European explorers of the 19th and 20th centuries have been her inspiration in writing, visiting, and exploring off the beaten track.