Welcome to the Personal Fundraising Page of Stephanie Kallos

Please support me as I take an amazing journey. The Out of the Darkness Overnight Experience is a 20-mile walk over the course of one night. Net proceeds benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, funding research, education, and awareness programs – both to prevent suicide and to assist those affected by suicide.

Here is the story behind my desire to participate in this event:

As someone who makes a living as a novelist, I am frequently asked to give advice to aspiring writers. One of the things I tell them is how essential it is to seek out a supportive community, even if it’s a small one. As an example, I like to tell the story of my first experience as a member of a writer's group.
In 1994, when my eldest son was a baby, I was trying to navigate toward the life I’d dreamed of ever since I wrote my first story at the age of seven.
My husband and I had a friend staying with us at the time. He was a far more experienced and credentialed writer than I, and when I shared with him the fact that I had a file cabinet full of short stories that had never seen the light of day, he made a very generous and (to my way of thinking anyway) radical proposal:
We would meet once a week and read something we’d written. It could be a page, a paragraph, a sentence. It could be a grocery list. We could invite comments or not.
I was astonished. Is this what “real” writers really did?
It sounded too good to be true. Above all, it sounded safe.
And so, every Saturday for several weeks in the fall of 1994, my friend and I met in the dark, cavernous place I euphemistically referred to as “my office” and read to one another. The gift of our time together was immeasurable.
My friend's name was Michael Maschinot. In the kindest, gentlest, most nurturing way possible, Michael gave me my first experience of being accountable to someone else as a writer. My showing up every week to read something to him was a contract, a bargain. Suddenly, my writing mattered to someone besides me.
I would not have the life - or the career - that I have now had it not been for Michael. His name was in the acknowledgements pages of my first novel; it will be on the dedication page of my second.
Michael committed suicide on June 22, 2007. I am walking for him.

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