News from the Mad River Valley

Just stopped by my publishers website: http://www.braiswick.com/ and found this posted.
Thanks Trevor for saving the article: I would have missed it, and you know how authors love the occasional coverage!

(I post it now primarily because cyber space seems to be forever. I recently panicked when I'd realized in our last of 5 moves in the last 18 months, I'd lost some reviews from my first novel.
The beauty of blog-- I'll know where to look next time!)

The Valley REPORTER
Serving the Mad River Area Since 1971

07/06/2007
Vermont Playwrights Award Winner Announced
The Valley Players announces the winner of the 2007 Vermont Playwrights Award: Return to West Raven by Eben Reilly of Bomoseen, Vermont.

The play takes place in a southern Vermont town where Adam Pierce, up from NYC for the summer, encounters his Gulf War dad's ghost among the wrecked cars and vans that litter his uncle's back acres. Sapped by the lethargy and sickness of Gulf War Syndrome and driven to despair by the government's refusal to acknowledge his disease, Richard Pierce had driven his VW Rabbit under the wheels of an oncoming tractor trailer truck when his son, Adam, was only five. Adam only now begins to understand that it was no accident and only now can he reconcile his life without his father and attempt to restore his wrecked life.

Eben Reilly lives in a netherworld of fiction and drama playing out in her head as she shuttles between her home in Castleton, Vermont, and her livelihood in New York City where she teaches for ASA Institute and CUNY. Having earned an MFA in playwriting at Brooklyn College in the late 1980s, she detoured into marriage and technical writing, primarily grants, proposals and press releases for public sculptor and husband Robert Ressler. When Reilly moved to Vermont with her husband to raise their three children, then two, three and five, she began freelancing children's stories and poems, segueing into young adult fiction as her children reached their own adolescence. However, life has a way of circling back, and with Return to West Raven the author has returned to drama, recently completing her second play entitled Bodies Whose Bodies.

Return to West Raven is the 21st play to receive the Vermont Playwrights Award, which was established in 1982 to promote the theater arts and to encourage and support the creation of original plays by residents of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Winning playwrights receive a cash prize of $1,000 and the possibility of production. The award is supported by the Audrey Mixer Endowment Fund, which was formed in memory of one of the Valley Players' most talented actresses by her husband, Richard Mixer.

Deadline for submissions of plays is February 1 of each year.More information on the Valley Players may be found on the web at www.valleyplayers.com.


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