BETHANY REID. Reid is the author of The Coyotes and My Mom (1990). She has published essays, book reviews and poetry in local and national journals. She is a former poetry and interview /essay editor at Seattle Review. Reid is department head of the Everett Community College English department, where she teaches writing and literature. In 2004 she won the Lohmann Poetry Prize (Olympia Poetry Network), and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has given readings from Bellingham to Olympia, and was one of four visiting authors at the Stanwood High School Writer's Conference in October. She has taught poetry to three groups of fourth graders on Art Day in Edmonds this past November, and has poems forthcoming from Calyx (Oregon) and North Dakota Quarterly.

She gave an informal talk and presented us with a list of notable quotations from various writers. One of my favorites is from Saul Bellow’s father (on editing): “You write and then you erase,” he said when Mr. Bellow was in his 20s. “You call that a profession?”

A couple more goodies:

“I’ve never thought of myself as a good writer…but I’m one of the world’s great rewriters.”—James Michener.

“Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.”—Flannery O’Connor.

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back again.”—Oscan Wilde.

“When I say writing, o, believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.”—Robert Louis Stevenson.