Fabulous Realities by Colleen Anderson

" - Nancy Mattei, MA

"Your music touches a place deep in my soul. Please keep putting into verse and song what so many of us feel but can't find the words to express." - Mary Lee Scalf, VA

"Every song means something personal to me." - Beverly Walter, WV

BIO INFO ABOUT COLLEEN: Colleen Anderson is a designer, performer, workshop leader, and writer. She owns Mother Wit Writing and Design, a creative studio in Charleston. She performs frequently with guitarist George Castelle and also with Julie Adams and Karen Vuranch.

As a designer, Anderson has some 30 years of experience, including 17 years as designer of Goldenseal, the state’s folklife magazine, for which she has also been a contributing writer. Her designs have won awards from West Virginia Communicators and the National Federation of Press Women.

For more than 20 years, Anderson has led creative writing workshops in West Virginia, including many weeklong and eight-week workshops for teen and adult writers, respectively. With Julie Adams, she has led several workshops that concentrated on folk song and songwriting at Michigan State University. She and Adams are also co-leaders of an annual weeklong songwriting workshop at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

Anderson’s songs have been featured on Public Radio International’s Mountain Stage and The Folk Sampler, and she has produced two albums of original songs, Fabulous Realities (1991) and Going Over Home (2001). Her song “West Virginia Chose Me” is included in several anthology recordings of West Virginia music, and two others have won the FOOTMAD songwriting contest and qualified for the semi-finals in the Mountain Stage NewSong performing songwriter competition.

Anderson’s other published and/or broadcast writing includes six years of editorial copywriting for the state’s official travel guide, West Virginia Wild & Wonderful (honored as the Best State Travel Guide in 2005); restaurant reviews for Mid-Atlantic Country Magazine; more than 100 essays for West Virginia Public Radio, two of which won national awards; and dozens of short stories and poems, including publications in Redbook, Arts & Letters, Kestrel, Antietam Review, and others. Her article “A Pawpaw Primer” has been chosen for inclusion in Cornbread Nation III: The Best of Southern Food Writing. Anderson’s writing has earned two $3,500 artist fellowships from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts (1994, playwriting, and 2000, nonfiction). She recently received an invitation to spend three months at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation artists’ retreat in Taos, NM beginning in January 2007.

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