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I Love Book Clubs
I LOVE BOOK CLUBS As a non-fiction author, it’s particularly meaningful when you have a chance to connect live with readers who’ve had the experience to “meet” your real life characters. This opportunity recently happened for me when I got an email invitation to attend a long standing book club who’d read Adventurers Against Their…
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Help Build Confidence in a Writer
Help Build Confidence in a Writer…An Evening of Readings February 20, 2015 at Florida Institute of Technology Evans Library… What does a Shuttle astronaut, an honorary Brevard County Historian, the wife of a Florida former poet laureate and Joanie Holzer Schirm have in common? Nothing that I, Joanie, can figure out until February 20, 2015…
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Celebrate Literacy Week, Florida! 2015 Kicks off in Orlando!
January 26, 2015: On a perfect sunny day, with music, dance, drama, and book character impersonations, students, staff and dignitaries from Orange County, Florida’s Timber Creek High School kicked off Celebrate Literacy Week, Florida! Florida Department of Education’s annual event celebrates the tremendous success Florida’s students have accomplished over the past decade. Recognizing “reading accelerates…
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Remembrance + Hope – A Common Cause for Humanity
Remembrance + Hope – A Common Cause for Humanity It would seem to most that the United Nations-sanctioned International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 and Chinese New Year this January 31st would have little to do with one another. And yet during my father’s life, and now in my own daily writing,…
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Things that are tough are what you remember.
Things that are tough are what you remember. I was brought up on the view that if you wait patiently until the end of the story, the good people will live happily ever after. As a 1960’s child, “Treat others with respect and make the world better wherever you go” paraphrases the example…
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Honoring UN World Refugee Day – June 20th – 74 years hence, my dad’s journey as a refugee
Docks in Hong Kong, June 24, 1939 – L to R: unidentified aide to Frantisek Urbana, Leo Lilling (Valdik’s “distant cousin), and Oswald “Valdik” Holzer, a stateless Czech citizen on his way to China after escaping his Nazi-occupied homeland (then the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) According to the United Nations, every minute, 8 people…
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CP April 2013 Interviewee is Local Orlando Author Joanie Schirm of Adventurers Against Their Will
Orlando Author Joanie Schirm of Adventurers Against Their Will is feature interviewee When my family moved some twenty years ago to the charming Orlando downtown neighborhood nicknamed “College Park”, for the first time in my adult life, I felt really at home. Since I’d left home at 17 for college, I’d always lived in what…
Steadfast Ink: The Journey Within
MY DEAR BOY: A World War II Story of Escape, Exile, and Revelation
Adventurers Against Their Will
