The Writing Champions Project

Stronger together - because writers need community.

Heidi Suydam is the founder of the SOS Blog, Simply Our Society, focused on midlife, mom-life and mental health. As content manager and an author on the SOS Blog it is her desire to provide quality content, reliable resources and an easy, user friendly format for women of all ages looking for inspiration, help and encouragement in life. Heidi graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia with a double major in Sociology and Psychology. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and family.

Robert Charles Gompers is an award-winning poet and playwright whose plays have been produced in several major cities across America. His play, The Long Ride Home, won Best Play at The Fresh Fruit Festival at Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City. His performance piece, Once Upon A Time, a tongue in cheek fusion of nursery rhymes and political affairs, won the top prize at the North Carolina University Performance Poetry festival. The next year he returned with, Poetry Slam, a piece that playfully mocked hipster poets, the art of bad poetry, and the concept of poetry competitions. Much to his surprise, he was awarded again. With over 25 plays to his credit, career highlights include Museum, an interactive theater retrospective of women in history, to being commissioned to create a theatrical parody of American Idol. His play, Explosive Park, dealt with homophobia and violence within the gay community, while Neurasthenia (a nervous breakdown) featured Mrs. Martha Bernays-Freud analyzing misdiagnosed cases of female hysteria by her husband “and world-renowned smarty pants,” Sigmund. Mr. Gompers has recently finished his four-book series, The Gory Guide to Dating, which spans the course of three decades during one man’s search for love as he dates the alphabet. He is presently working on his fifth novel and adapting The Gory Guide to Dating as a television series. 

Karen, an enneagram 4 with a tendency towards rebellion found herself grounded in the fourth grade for wearing eyeliner. She wrote the top ten reasons why she shouldn’t be grounded, folded it up and slipped it into the hallway vent that led to the basement where her parents were sitting and then watched through the cracks of the vent as her mom picked up the note and read it to her dad. They giggled and said “she’s not getting out of her grounding, but wow, she can write!” She stood up, forgetting about the grounding, thinking, thinking about her dad’s words. “She can write.” And so she did.  

You can find Karen writing in the Hope Writers community, on her blog, Instagram, facebook and here. She believes that writing comes from a deep ache to know and be known and she draws much of her inspiration from nature and the ordinary moments we all live but seldom notice. She reads her words out loud to see how they sound and if they sing, she hits publish. She hopes you’ll do the same, without fear, without hesitation.  

Karen took creative writing classes at York University, The University of Toronto and the Humber School for Writers, but she believes that writing comes from the deep places of our hearts and the classroom of humanity.  

Megan Waldrep is a columnist and freelance writer living on a 34-foot sailboat, currently off the coast of Mexico. She specializes in real-life relationship stories you can relate to. 

For more, visit: www.meganwaldrep.com

Mel Greenberg is an award-winning producer and author. Running With Our Eyes Closed, the debut in the Empty Nested series. In addition to the next book in the Empty Nested series, Mel is working on several projects, ghostwriting and producing. 

Mel worked as a copywriter and producer in radio and television before having children and making the decision to stay at home with them full-time. It was her own empty nest experience that led Mel to return to her passion of writing, exploring the journey to find relevance in midlife and beyond.

When she's not visiting her boys, and traveling the world, she enjoys life in the Southwest with her husband Dean, her beloved English Bulldog Stella, and German Shepherd Grazia.