Beginning with a fledgling effort five years ago, the Whidbey Island Writers Conference has grown to a premiere event in the literary world.

Freeland resident Celeste Mergens has spearheaded the projrect, gathering a small cadre of volunteers who tirelessly plan the intriguing fireside chats, innovative classes and preeminent authors, poets, agents and editors who attract attendees from around the world. And the friendly, informal sessions take place in the appealing setting of Whidbey Island.

This year the list of presenters has become even more illustrious, including names such as Richard Lederer, celebrated punster who pens the Anguished English series; noted poet Mary Lou Sanelli; Rick Bass, the author of 18 books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, “The Hermit’s Story” and “The Roadless Yaak”; and Elizabeth George, distinguished suspense writer whose novels have drawn legions of devotees and whom The New York Times has described as “a master of the British mystery.”

While the conference itself is full, islanders have the opportunity to take part in several public events, among them an open mic Song Fest with professional songwriters as well as the unveiling of the writers conference first publication, the anthology “Sea of Voices, Isle of Story.”

They can also hear Elizabeth George in a free address Friday, when she will talk about writing careers in a presentation called Make Your Choice Today: Writer or Author.

George lives in Huntington Beach, Calif., making frequent trips to London, where she has a flat in South Kensington. She is known for her signature series of mystery novels that began with “A Great Deliverance” and whose most recent title is “A Traitor to Memory.” Her two protagonists are a Scotland Yard detective named Thomas Lynley, Lord Asherton, and his partner, Sgt. Barbara Havers.

“I deliberately made Lynley an earl for my own amusement since I thought it would be more fun to write about an earl than to write about an ordinary schmuck living on a policeman’s salary in an ill-lit bed/sitting room with a neon light going on and off outside,” George says on her Web site,

www.elizabethgeorgeonline.com.

“Barbara Havers would be his polar opposite and would serve the function initially of introducing the reader to Lynley through her eyes and in her mind before the reader ever saw the man himself. I hoped in this way to prepare the reader to like — rather than dislike — Lynley. Since Barbara hated him so much herself and since she herself was fairly unlikeable, it seemed to me reasonable to conclude that however she felt about someone, the reader was likely to feel the opposite.”

The relationship between the two, as it has progressed through the novels, has matured into a complex one that has kept readers intensely involved as each case develops.

It may be one reason, along with increasingly intricate plots and a discriminating attention to her craft, that George says the time she spends writing a novel has gotten longer over the years.

“I wrote my first novel, ‘A Great Deliverance,’ in three and-a-half weeks,” she said. The most recent book in the series, “In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner,” took her two years from the time she began the research until the book was in production.

“The rough draft, however, took about 15 months,” she said.

While George is herself is self-taught — “aside from three creative writing classes I took between the time I was 19 and 21 years old” — she is active in the instructional field.

A former high school and community college teacher, she has also taught at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the University of California in Irvine, and through Edinboro University’s summer program at Exeter College in Oxford University.

She teaches at the Maui Writers Retreat in Hawaii once a year and meets weekly with a group of unpublished writers in her home when she is in California.

She also offers an annual five-day intensive writing seminar for novelists at Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif.

“We work from nine in the morning to 10 or 11 o’clock at night, and most people’s writing undergoes a profound change while they’re with me … as long as they do the assignments I give them,” she said.

George is eloquent about her writing philosophy. Novels were designed to entertain, she says, and writers who wish to keep the art form alive need to keep this in mind.

“To aim for lofty literature instead of aiming for a good story with real characters who grow and develop and a setting that’s brought to life is to go at the art form like putting the varnish on the canvas first,” she said.

She says she writes mystries — or rather crime novels or stories of psychological suspense — “because I like the throughline a crime offers me.

The crime and its solution provide a natural structure on which I can hang as much or as little as I like.”

She can also make the book as sophisticated or as simple as she wants to.

“I can take a rule of crime fiction and deliberately break it. I can take the readers’ preconceived notions about what a crime novel is and turn those notions on their heads. In short, a crime novel gives me tremendous flexibility as a writer while still demanding that I adhere — relatively — to a structure that provides a satisfactory and believable solution to the mystery.”

George has won the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award, and France’s Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere for “A Great Deliverance,” for which she was also nominated for the Edgar and the Macavity awards.

Her novels have been optioned for the screen three times, and “A Great Deliverance” aired recently in this country on the Public Broadcasting System.

Student writing contest winners listed

The Writers’ Association has also announced the 2003 winners of the Celebrate Writing Contest for students. The contest is open to all Whidbey Island public, private and homeschooled students, kindergarten through 12th grade. The contest, which has grown in popularity since it began four years ago received more than 440 manuscripts this year.

To honor the young Whidbey Island poets and authors, all manuscripts will be displayed at the Writers’ Conference Feb. 28-March 2, where writers from all over the world are invited to comment on them.

Manuscripts are also on display at Sno-Isle branch libraries through Feb. 27, and March 2-16. Oak Harbor and Coupeville students’ work, K-12, are in their respective libraries. South Whidbey manuscripts are divided: grades K-5 in Freeland and grades 6-12 in Langley.

The Whidbey Island Writers Association is a group of volunteers who offer support to writers through services and educational and networking opportunities that nurture and support the gifts of writers. For more information, go online to www.whidbey.com/writers.

The winners are:

• Kindergarten
  • Poetry
    1. Alex Duccini
    2. Kaj Lund Olsen
    3. John Car
  • Stories
    1. Iona Mae Rohan
    2. Clara Larsen-Clifford
    3. Kaj Lund Olsen.
• First Grade
  • Poetry
    1. Kayla Hingson
    2. Justice Mueller
    3. Ben Etzell
  • Stories
    1. Grace Matthew
    2. Sophie Fernandez
    3. Andy Walker.
• Second Grade
  • Poetry
    1. Madison McPhee
    2. David Sipes
    3. Quadra Wilcox
  • Stories
    1. Kailee Jo Marin
    2. Juliana Briella Nolen
    3. Lydia Rodriguez
• Third Grade
  • Poetry
    1. Rachel Parker
    2. Dinah Hassrick
    3. KariAnna Clausen
  • Fiction
    1. Linden Firethorne
    2. Alexandra Gavac
    3. (tie) Megan McAdams and Ramona Fankhausen
• Third-Fourth Grades
  • Personal Narrative
    1. Cole Gibbons
    2. Peter C. Lett
    3. Mariah Ferguson
• Fourth Grade
  • Poetry
    1. Hannah Rose Peterson
    2. Cole Gibbons
    3. Rachel Means
  • Fiction
    1. Erica Ruth
    2. Alex Wallace
    3. Kip Hacking
  • Essay
    1. Kaden Paggao
    2. Jessica Schank
    3. Chaz Petteway
• Fifth Grade
  • Poetry
    1. Nate Schwartz
    2. Marissa Sutherland
    3. Shamus McNamara
  • Fiction
    1. Cayla Calderwood
    2. Zach Idso
    3. Erin Neilon
  • Essay
    1. Marissa Sutherland
    2. Maggie Gorman
    3. Erin Neilon
  • Personal Narrative
    1. Matt Bolte
    2. Megan Vahsen
    3. Heidi K. Smith
• Sixth Grade
  • Poetry
    1. Kale Laster
    2. Austin Booth
    3. Kaley Gracom
  • Fiction
    1. Christopher Olson
    2. Andrea Rieck
    3. Devon Gibbons
  • Essay/Personal Narrative
    1. Devon Gibbons
    2. Courtney Bosman
    3. Danny Torget
• Seventh Grade
  • Poetry
    1. Helena Farkas
    2. Oceana Sharp
    3. Roxanne Lamm
  • Fiction
    1. Jasmine Allen
    2. Kevin Ruth
    3. Tommy Slais
• Seventh-Eighth Grades
  • Essay/Personal Narrative
    1. McKenzie Rider
    2. Kevin Bosman
    3. Jared Moore
• Eighth Grade
  • Poetry
    1. Gregory Colfer
    2. Alison Warstler
    3. Carrie Combs
  • Fiction
    1. Ian Laster
    2. James Simon
    3. Brooke Sinclair
• Ninth-10th Grades
  • Poetry
    1. Kellie Robinson
    2. Erin Hilton
    3. Natania Asay
  • Fiction
    1. Joe McArdle
    2. Rebecca Olson
    3. Kelsi K. Franzen
• Ninth-12th Grades
  • Essay/Personal Narrative
    1. Kelsi K. Franzen
    2. Misty Dawn Downard
    3. Heather Craig
• 11th Grade
  • Poetry
    1. Shannon Engel
    2. Ramona Emerson
    3. Rebecca Jaffe
• 12th Grade
  • Poetry
    1. Valerie Mock
    2. Zach Harris
    3. Tassa Davis