LAKE COUNTY – Six years ago the California State Assembly officially declared the third week in October as California Writers Week. This month throughout the state, the California Writers Club’s 18 branches are hosting programs and other activities during California Writers Week to celebrate their organization’s 100th anniversary while showing that their members know how to have fun with literature and writing.

Events range from municipal proclamations in several communities to special speakers in Bakersfield, Mt. Diablo, Orange, Pleasanton, Ridgecrest, and Sacramento, panel discussions in Apple Valley and Montclair, and readings in Fremont and Marin.

The San Fernando Valley branch featured past winners of the CWC’s prestigious Jack London Award. Two branches announced costume parties – Long Beach (“come as a favorite author or visual pun on a book title”) and South Bay (“an author, character from a story, book, movie, play, fairytale, mythology, political scandal, or even the member’s own lurid past”).

The East Sierra branch created a display for the city library with artifacts including a May 1917 issue of Harper’s Magazine highlighting Mark Twain, and a first edition of Jack London’s Call of the Wild.

The Central Coast branch concluded its “100 Words – 100 Years – $100” writing contest, and the Redwood branch caps the week on October 24 with the Redwood Writers Conference in Santa Rosa – a day-long workshop filled with speakers, panels, and one-on-one editorial consultations.

On the state level, the CWC presents this year’s Jack London Awards in Oakland on Nov. 8, and has also called for submissions for a time capsule about the future of print media.

The public is invited to send essays about what people will be reading in 2035, whether we still have conventional newspapers, magazines and books, and what impact state-of-the-art technology will have on news reporting, fiction, nonfiction, short stories, poems, reference works, and daily life in general.

The capsule will be opened in 2035, Mark Twain’s bicentennial. Anyone interested in participating should mail his or her essay to California Writers Club, P.O. Box 484, Ridgecrest, CA 93556, together with the author’s name, age, address, and permission to publish all or part of the essay.

California had only been a state for about 50 years when Jack London and some of his friends started their informal gatherings.

These meetings became the California Writers Club. The CWC encourages everyone to check www.calwriters.org periodically for membership information, updates on branch and centennial activities around California, and resources for educators such as quotations by California writers and, coming soon, a word search puzzle based on California authors.