Writing Non-Fiction: An Informal Discussion
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| Marvin Shepherd |
Thursday July 16
6:30-7:30
California Genealogical Society
2201 Broadway, LL2
Oakland, California 94612
Names. Dates. Facts. You’ve done the research, organized the
data, and reviewed your sources. Now what? Do you ever wonder how to take all
that data and write something your family will want to read? Do you wonder how
to combine facts with legends in order to create an interesting article?
Meet CGS member and author, Marvin Shepherd. A retired
investigative engineer, Marv is the author of 3 books for engineers and more
than two hundred technical articles. During a career that spanned more than
fifty years, Marv developed his writing and research skills while investigating
accidents.
After his retirement in 2008, Marv started looking into the
lives of interesting people and the legends surrounding those personalities. As
a boy, he worked in the garden of a Eureka woman where he heard tales about her
father, a Danish sea Captain. Marv discovered that the sea Captain “arrived in San Francisco on a whaling
ship, just at the time that gold was discovered in 1849. Slightly later, 1850,
he located the entrance to Humboldt Bay, California, settled there
and became quite wealthy as a bar captain, lumberman, and rancher
in Eureka.” Marv put his investigative skills to work and wrote a
biography called The Sea Captain’sOdyssey. He published a second non-fiction book in 2014, A Scottish Syndicate in the Redwoods.
This tale of fraud in Humboldt County was based on information he discovered
while researching the sea Captain.
Marvin Shepherd will
lead a casual and informative group discussion about writing non-fiction on
Thursday July 16 from 6:30-7:30 pm. He will discuss how to approach the writing
of non-fiction books, techniques he used, suggestions for finding facts, and
looking at some unusual sources. Of course, there will be plenty of time for
Q&A.
This discussion group
is free and open to the public. Please RSVP at Eventbrite. The library will be
open from 10:00 am until 8:00 pm. Feel free to come early and do some research,
or bring a bagged dinner before the discussion and meet other genealogists.
Copyright © 2015 by California Genealogical Society and Library
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