ASJA PACIFIC NORTHWEST NEWSLETTER
For ASJA members in
Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon and Washington
December 2025
https://asjapnw.org
In This Issue
From the Prez, Sharing the Lead, Carolyn Miller, ASJA PNW President
Did You Know? Holiday Celebrations in the Early Years, Bruce Miller
Rekindling My International Travel Bug, Joanna Nesbit
Old Style Greetings, Bruce Miller
Tech Short: Scan and Split, Bruce Miller
Member News and Announcements
Our December chapter meeting at 11 am:
M. Carolyn Miller is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Time: Wednesday, December 17, 2025
11:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87898612924
Meeting ID: 878 9861 2924
It has been my pleasure to be the ASJA Pacific Northwest chapter Newsletter Editor since September, 2020. I’ve been inspired by great writing, craft, and meeting or exceeding deadlines. My thanks to all of our contributors and my editorial team. Bruce Miller has continually provided technical expertise and Catherine Kolonko and Fred Gebhart have been stellar proofreaders.
Now, it’s time for me to move on and this will be my last issue as editor.
I wish all chapter members and their loved ones a healthy, productive, and prosperous 2026.
— Maxine Cass
Your chapter president, M. Carolyn Miller, is seeking a volunteer newsletter editor.
From the President
by M. Carolyn Miller
ASJA PNW Chapter President
Sharing the Lead
In the wake of our last meeting, I have had a lot of thoughts about leadership and value. I’ve written articles on three types of leadership styles: collaborative, controlling or a blending of the two. At our meetings, I strive for the latter, but when under stress, default to command-and-control (thanks Dad!). My apologies to all who attended.
At the meeting, I vented my frustration at what I perceived as a lack of value related to our meetings given the low attendance at one. Members assured me otherwise. But what this has led me to think about is how we can restructure our chapter so that it is more inclusive and collaborative.
Given that, I suggest that we use our January meeting as an opportunity to put in place a new, more collaborative model for our meetings and activities. I’m not sure what that would look like, but I have some ideas, as I’m sure you will.
On another note, I recently reviewed Michelle Rafter’s e-book, Building an Independent Writing Business, available free of charge to members. It has tons of ASJA resources in it and reminds me of the value of our organization. I urge you to take a look at it. I plan to revisit it and take advantage of the membership benefits I too often forget are available. It’s a perfect business reboot tool for the New Year.
As the old year winds down and a new one is on the horizon, I find myself grateful for a lot of things, including, especially, being able to share this space with such a bright, skilled and dedicated group of writers.
Happy Holidays,
Carolyn
M. Carolyn Miller, MA, spent her career designing narrative- and game-based learning. Today, she consults and writes about narrative in our lives and world, the inextricable link between the two, and the critical role of self-awareness in transforming both. www.cultureshape.com
Did You Know? Holiday Celebrations in the Early Years
During the first three decades of the Society of Magazine Writers – now the American Society of Journalists and Authors – most members lived in or near New York City, the publishing center of the United States.
Members began an annual Christmas Party in 1954 that started as a simple grab-bag gift exchange. The event morphed into more elaborate gatherings with attendance often exceeding 200 people, including spouses, editors, and public relations professionals. The more elaborate gatherings included entertainment. The Christmas December 12, 1958, party, which also served in part as a 10-year anniversary party of SMW, included entertainers who performed for free. As reported in the December 1958 newsletter: “With a total attendance of 210, including representatives of seventeen magazines, the evening was climaxed by singer Pat Suzuki and comedians Sam Levinson, Milt Kamin and the team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May . . . “
—From Bruce Milller
by Joanna Nesbit
Rekindling My International Travel Bug
In October, my husband and I took a trip to Portugal, my first trip abroad in 20 years and our first as a couple since 1993 when we went to Nepal together. Wow—that was a long time ago! Curt had traveled to Bolivia a few years back to help our then college undergrad with some senior thesis plant research there, but otherwise we’ve spent the last two decades stateside, taking domestic road trips and paying college bills.
Joanna and Curt in Evora. Photo courtesy Joanna Nesbit.
Portugal was inspired by our longtime Seattle friends who had moved there in early 2025 to become expats. They encouraged us to visit, and we arrived just a few weeks after they had moved from their village rental to a purchased home an hour north of Lisbon and a few minutes’ drive from the beach.
Joanna on the walls of Obidos Castle. Photo by Curt Veldhuisen.
We spent lovely time with those friends, strolling the nearby beach at sunset, touring a medieval village that was hosting a literary festival (apparently festivals are the way they fund upkeep of the ancient stone walls and architecture), touring a palace or two, meandering cobblestoned streets, and digging into late tapas lunches with our friends’ helpful knowledge of Portuguese fare.
Joanna standing in a schist village doorway. Photo by Curt Veldhuisen.
But where we found our long-buried international travel stride was in Lisbon when we were on our own. We took a bus to the city and over three days rediscovered a simpatico travel rhythm I’d forgotten we had. We figured out the metro together, each of us picking up on different cues; we easily agreed on evening discovery walks; and when we stumbled on it, we both wanted to visit the Museum of Resistance and Freedom. (Deeply relevant in our era of US politics.)
Besides allowing us to check in with each other in a deeper way, the trip reignited my passion for international travel, long tamped down while raising kids. As a 20-something, I had spent four years traveling and working abroad, formative years that shaped me and changed the way I looked at the world. In Portugal, even though we stayed with friends and tended toward the touristy sites, I could feel my curiosity and passion unfurling, freed from little people’s needs and the quotidian tasks of home.
The challenge, of course, now that we’re back: how do you keep things interesting when you can’t simply board a flight for destinations abroad? I’ve tried to keep a few things in mind. Be in the moment, notice things when you head out for a walk, actually go outside, start something new, do something social, do something by yourself, sign up for a workshop or a class, try something creative. But I’ll be the first to say I’m not jumping into all these things.
It turns out my new hobby is reading the Rick Steves Facebook page way more than I care to admit. Questions about possible itineraries pull me in like quicksand. Thinking about more travel is way more fun than signing up for a workshop, and my real vow to myself is to do more of it and not let poor substitutes get in the way. I’ve got England on the brain. 😊
Joanna lives in Bellingham, Washington, and writes primarily about higher education and financial aid. Years ago, she tried travel writing and wouldn’t mind dipping a toe in again—as long as traveling for fun stays a priority.
by Bruce Miller
Old Style Greetings
Among the numerous items my father left behind when he died at 100 years and 1 month — and 70 years in the same house — were about 1,000 postcards. He collected postcards in addition to stamps. I had originally marked the shoe boxes of postcards for possible donation. When I finally had time, I took a look at a few cards that pulled me into a time-consuming process of looking at each card one by one. Because, at about the 20th card, I found a postcard my father had sent to himself in 1942 while in the Army stationed at Fort Lewis just south of Seattle. From those 1,000 postcards about 85 tracked his locations through 1943 while stationed at various bases across the United States before his 204th Field Artillery Battalion was sent to Europe. Servicemen only needed to write “Free” above the stamp box.
Another discovery was a postcard mailed in 1939 to my father’s parents from my father’s uncle Harvey Sr, who had moved to the Seattle area with family in 1937. In November 2025 I hand-delivered that postcard to Harvey Jr, who at 102 years old gave me the full story of the trip with his father Sr and family from Iowa to the Puget Sound area.
Included in these 1,000 postcards were many Christmas postcards, used and unused. Throughout the past decade or so I created my own Christmas postcards, unaware that in the early 1900’s Christmas postcards were common. No internet. No TV. Emerging radio. Few phones in houses. Written communication on paper was important, and postcards were the cheapest way to extend a holiday greeting through the US Mail. Many of the early Christmas postcards were embossed, helping to accentuate the design, but probably interfering with the cursive writing.
None of the early postcards in the collection have hand printing. All cursive. This simple form of holiday greeting seems to have disappeared from the drug stores. With the increasing price of postage, might the holiday postcards become more common again?
Seattle resident Bruce Miller was surprised to see the shorthand “Xmas” used in the early 1900’s on Christmas postcards.
Tech Short: Scan and Split
One of the problems when scanning hundreds and even thousands of family photographs is capturing anything written on the back and keeping it with the image. One way to ensure that image and comments remain together is to scan and save in multi-page tif (tagged image format) format.
This format in turn creates other problems. Many image viewers do not support multi-page tif and many viewers will only show the first image in a multi-page tif. Multi-page tiffs are also not suitable for displaying in a web browser.
To solve these problems and especially the browser problem, there are a few image utilities that will extract the images in a multi-page tif into separate image files and preserve the filename by adding a number suffix such as “00” and “01” to indicate the page (front or back) of the image.
One such versatile utility is ImageMagick®. ImageMagick® supports batch extractions that are easily implemented in a Windows batch (.bat) file. (Ask AI to create a sample batch file.) The batch file can be set to direct the output files to a different directory to preserve the original multi-page tif files.
–by Bruce Miller
Member News and Announcements
Darlene West suggests: Publishing industry pro Jane Friedman is presenting a webinar on AI for writers on December 17 at noon Pacific time. The presentation, offered by Craft Talks, will focus on how to incorporate AI into your workflow so you can free up creative time: which tasks are ripe for AI assistance, how to use AI as a research assistant, brainstorming with AI, and more. For more information, or to register: https://writingcraft.com/event/using-ai/
Bruce Miller has added to the asjapnw.org website including a list of articles written for the chapter newletter since it began in November, 2018. (https://asjapnw.org/newsindex/). Also included are articles on PNW chapter history, national awards, several books and a list of conferences. Find the history through the History option in the menu.
NEWSLETTER PRODUCED BY
EDITOR: Maxine Cass
PROOFREADER: Catherine Kolonko
TECHNICAL EXPERTISE: Bruce Miller
*All stories are copyright by their respective writers.
*All photographs and illustrations are copyright by their creative makers.
*All rights are reserved to each of them for their own material.