Welcome to the
Published Writers
of Rossmoor

It’s never too late to start writing or publishing! The Published Writers of Rossmoor offers the companionship of like-minded individuals, and welcomes both aspiring and published writers: anyone interested in learning more about writing. The members of PWR are novelists and poets, historians and memoirists with these in common - a word processor and a dream. Our community is here to help you grow as a writer and provide advice on publishing and promoting your work: from workshops to critique groups, we’re here for you. Meetings are held on the first Saturday of each month (except July) at 10am in the Fairway Room in the Creekside Building. Guests are always welcome.

August 3^rdSpeaker

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Gregory Crouch

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The speaker for PWR’s August meeting will be Gregory Crouch, a local author who specializes in historic and adventurous subjects. He will be talking about the process of writing his epic rags-to-riches tale, “THE BONANZA KING: John Mackay and the Battle Over the Greatest Riches in the American West”.

Crouch graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, where he studied history. He completed U.S. Army Airborne and Ranger schools and led two infantry platoons before leaving the Army to pursue other interests, most notably in rock and ice climbing and in mountaineering. He developed a particular fascination with the peaks of Patagonia. Along the way he became a writer; his work has appeared in magazines such as National Geographic, the Atlantic, Outside, Islands, American History, Ascent, Rock & Ice, Climbing (where he was a senior contributing editor), and many others. A regular book reviewer, Crouch has reviewed for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and NPR.

“THE BONANZA KING” tells the story of John W. Mackay, a penniless Irish immigrant who came of age in New York City, went to California during the Gold Rush, and mined without much luck for eight years. When he heard of riches found on the other side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1859, Mackay abandoned his claim and walked a hundred miles to the Comstock Lode in Nevada.

Over the course of the next dozen years, Mackay worked his way up from nothing, thwarting the pernicious “Bank Ring” monopoly to seize control of the most concentrated cache of precious metals ever found on earth, the legendary “Big Bonanza,” a stupendously rich body of gold and silver ore discovered 1,500 feet beneath the streets of Virginia City, the ultimate Old West boomtown. But for the ore to be worth anything it had to be found, claimed, and successfully extracted, each step requiring enormous risk and the creation of an entirely new industry. Gregory Crouch tells Mackay’s amazing story—how he extracted the ore from deep underground and used his vast mining fortune to crush the transatlantic telegraph monopoly of the notorious Jay Gould.

According to a review in The San Francisco Chronicle, “No one does a better job than Crouch when he explores the subject of mining, and no one does a better job than he when he describes the hardscrabble lives of miners”. “The Bonanza King” is a dazzling tour de force, a riveting history of Virginia City, Nevada, the Comstock Lode, and America itself.

Featured Authors are members of the Published Writers of Rossmoor group.

A different author will be featured periodically.

Featured Author

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Duke Robinson

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It’s very appropriate that Duke Robinson is PWR’s current Featured Author. Duke was the chairman of the steering committee that founded the Published Writers of Rossmoor in 2012, and he served as the club’s president from 2013 to 2016.

Duke holds a BA degree in philosophy (1954) from the Wheaton College, a Masters of Divinity degree (1958), from Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and an earned doctorate from San Francisco Theological Seminary (1979). He has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1960.

He was pastor of the dynamic Montclair Presbyterian Church in Oakland, CA. for 28 years, before retiring in 1996. During that ministry, he also served as an adjunct professor at San Francisco Theological Seminary, and was widely known for his appearances on Northern California television. He has lived in Rossmoor since 2000. He has four adult children, nine grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

In 1997, Time Warner published his first nonfiction award-winning book, GOOD INTENTIONS. In 2000, they published the paperback version, but titled it TOO NICE FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. It appeared in 14 languages and as an early Kindle book. It continues to sell today. In June of 2023, the China Youth Publishing House bought the rights to this book from Duke's publisher, now the French Hachette Book Group in Boston. Hachette believes they may want to use it as a textbook in universities. Last fall, a professor of American Literature at Beijing University translated the book into Chinese. They plan to publish it this month, if Chinese American tensions don't delay them.

In his second non-fiction book, CREATE YOUR BEST LIFE: How to Live Fully Knowing One Day You Will Die (2011), Duke writes intimately of the death of his wife of 54 years, Barbara, in 2008, and of his almost dying in 2009. In 2014, he authored a third non-fiction book A MIDDLE WAY: The Secular/Spiritual Road to WHOLENESS.

Duke thought his sixth book, The Self-Destruction of America’s Churches, which appeared in late December 2020, would be his last. But, over the past two years, he wrote a sequel to that book, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! Will Churches STOP and THINK?, which was published in April. You can find paperback and Kindle versions of Duke's books through this link: https://www.amazon.com/CHRISTS-SAKE-Will-Churches-THINK/dp/B0CZ9JJZ39/