Straw Dog Writers Guild is pleased to announce the appointment of Patricia Pin (known to most simply as “Pin”) as Executive Consultant of the organization, a new part-time, contracted position. A native of St. Thomas in southwestern Ontario, Canada, Pin now lives in the Berkshires. She comes to us from a position at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, Massachusetts, where she started as a docent and soon rose to become Public Programs Director for the center. During her last three years at The Mount, Pin fostered a partnership with SDWG to create a week-long Writers-in-Residence program for emerging writers, now entering its fourth year.
Pin sees her role as Executive Consultant to meld the efforts of SDWG’s various committee activities into a cohesive strategy. First and foremost, she said, “We need to be very clear about our mission. Straw Dog Writers Guild is a largely volunteer organization, with committee members working from their hearts. I visualize a bunch of balloons on strings floating in the air, all doing their own thing beautifully, ready to have someone tie those strings together into an artful knot.”
Her immediate goals are to: learn the culture of SDWG by meeting volunteers and community partners; attend as many events and programs as possible; and establish contacts with current donors, sponsors, and granting institutions. Specifically, Pin has also been tasked with coordinating SDWG’s Write Angles Conference for the fall of 2025, a huge challenge in itself.
Pin’s long-range plans include: formation of a Strategic Planning Committee; creation of a marketing plan to continue and extend the Guild’s reach into Berkshire, Franklin, and Hampden Counties; reconsideration of the SDWG membership model to offer resources such as opportunities to publish within the organization; and fundraising to build a position of salaried Executive Director in 2026.
In addition to her many organizational skills, Pin has had an affinity for the written word
since childhood. “I was an avid reader,” she said, “being left in the children’s section of the library for hours. I have pictures of myself in Kindergarten and Grade 1 with stacks of books.”
While working at The Mount full-time running the bookstore, Pin earned her MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts through a series of five ten-day residencies, with focuses on poetry and translation. Currently, Pin participates in three writing groups—one exclusively of poets, a non-fiction group with several SDWG members, and another with multi-genre writers.
“I wanted to write early in life,” Pin said, “but I had a very advanced—what I now know was an editor—in my head, so it took me until my 40s to come back to writing.
“I consider myself a proto-emerging writer, and have yet to seek publication for my
ramblings. My current projects include a manuscript for a debut chap book titled Hungry Ghosts:
From Fascism to Fettuccine and a creative nonfiction/prose poetry book titled Multiverse, which
explores my interest in theoretical physics and nihilism/consciousness/non dualistic
philosophical traditions—the kind of book that not even my mother would read!”
A font of ideas for expanding the reach of SDWG, Pin is also planning a pilot writing program for elementary school students to begin in fourth or fifth grade, and a tie with the MFA program at UMass to develop a podcast in which students would interview Straw Dog leadership and writers.
—Ed Orzechowski, Steering Committee