by Gail Wilson Kenna
In late February, I learned I had won six National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW) 2026 Biennial awards.
Yet the e-mail from the letters chairman in Florida went into spam—or trash as I think of it. I laughed because my second place in journalism was, “That’s Me in the Trash,” a 10-page piece about 20 years of cleaning Virginia Department of Transportation-adopted roadways in Northumberland County.
The NLAPW is an organization begun in 1897 by a female journalist in D.C., who was not allowed to join the male press corps. By 1921, this organization had 5,000 members. A requirement for membership was that the writer or artist had earned money from her art or writing. It is possible, though not common, to qualify in all three NLAPW categories: Letters, Art and Music.
In Dupont Circle is the NLAPW’s impressive Pen Arts Building.This 100 year-old mansion is where the organization’s revolving president lives during her term of office. Throughout the USA are Pen Women chapters. The one I am in, the Chesapeake Bay branch, has members from Williamsburg to West Point, from Gloucester to the Northern Neck. Our chapter meets on third Fridays for programs at either the library in Gloucester or Mathews. And each July we plan our programs for the year, except August.
I joined the chapter in 2014 but did not send entries until the 2020 Biennial. Since that year I have won 17 awards in Letters. The award money is small, but the challenge is large. The judges are not Pen Women and they read entries without knowing the identity of writers and poets. Then they select a first, second and third in each category of Letters. This year there were 19 categories and I submitted to the eight for prose. I particularly enjoyed the Ekphrastic, which asks for a 300 to 500 word piece in fiction or nonfiction about a painting. I created the voices of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, Fanny, in John Singer Sargent’s portrait of this famous writer. My whimsical and comical piece took second place. In 2024, I was given third place for “A Note to John Singer-Sargent” from the mysterious Hylda Wertheimer.
Being a Pen woman has kept me writing, especially essays, which I disliked in my youth. In high school, circa the late 1950s, we were not allowed to use “I” in an essay. We had timed essays on a teacher-directed topic, as blue-book preparation for college. Then in the mid-1970s, the Bay Area Writing Project at Cal-Berkeley showed me that writing was not the prescriptive way I had been taught.
I learned that writing is a process with stages and involves both pre-writing and lots of re-writing. An example of this is my essay on trash, originally published in Pleasant Living magazine as “Sisyphus on Crosshills.” The earlier essay only hinted at the latest version, which is twice as long and contains elements I discovered in re-writing the earlier essay. I edit and re-write on a computer. But in the first stage of creative writing, I use pen and paper, allowing my mind to wander as I seek a voice and if heard, then take dictation!
“Bittersweet,” awarded first in the short story this year, was one I wrote non-stop with a pen on yellow paper in Lima, Peru, in 2004. This four-page fictional story is about a Venezuelan soldier who cared for the horse my younger daughter rode in Caracas in the early 1990s. With this story I did what fine poets do when they work on poems for years, trying to find the exact words. My Pen sister, Carolyn Kreiter Foranda, a former Poet Laureate of Virginia, beautifully describes this patient process. That’s what I practiced over the years with “Bittersweet.” Which is why receiving first place felt so special.
My other first place was in a new nonfiction category sponsored by the current NLAPW Pen president, Sheila Byrnes. Another second place that pleased me was, “A Feminist’s Reflection on a Sexual Assault,” in a new category from the New York Central Branch.
I only began writing in the late 1970s because my husband, children, and I were leaving the Napa Valley after a decade there. That summer in my family’s 1920s cabin in the Sequoias, I discovered my great-great-grandfather’s 1849 Gold Rush letters, which his sister in Derby Line, Vermont, had copied into a ledger. This is what my grandmother gave me in 1979 because I was distraught about leaving California. That ledger with the voice of Eugene Chase gave me the courage to write a fictional story, Along the Gold Rush Trail, in print through New Reader’s Press for 20 years. Then in 2019, I reissued the book in a new, expanded version, Here to There and Back Again.
My joy has been to encourage others to write, in three colleges and two universities, and now by teaching for Rappahannock Community College’s adult institute, Rappahannock Institute for Lifelong Learning. Through Crosshill Creek Publications, I also work with those who want to write fiction and nonfiction.
What did I first write after the Bay Area Writing project at Berkely? Letters to the editor of The Napa Register. In this area we are fortunate to have the Rappahannock Record, which keeps a lot of us writing letters to the editor and submitting pieces that just might be published in the paper.
