Welcome to the October/November 2025 chapter newsletter. 

CHAPTER NEWS

• Volunteer Event - Open Arms of Minnesota

• Call for Interviews!

• Join our AMWA North Central LinkedIn Community

FEATURE ARTICLES

• North Central Book Club: 20 Years and Counting

• Book Club Selections for 2026

JOB BOARD

• Announcements

CHAPTER NEWS

Volunteer Event - Open Arms of Minnesota

By Adam Fix

On September 15th, a group of AMWA North Central Volunteers completed a 2-hour shift at Open Arms of Minnesota. There, we helped pack medically tailored meals for critically ill Minnesotans and their loved ones. In total, we:

• Packed 97 garlic parmesan pork meals

• Sliced 165 lb of hard-boiled eggs

• Peeled and chopped 68 lb of cucumbers

• Filled 657 dressing cups

Open Arms is a fantastic nonprofit that I’ve been involved with for almost a decade now; if you're in the Twin Cities metro area, please consider looking into volunteering at one of their sites! This was a great opportunity for AMWA members to do some good for our community while keeping it career-relevant.

This was the first time AMWA NCC had organized a group volunteer event. If there’s interest, we can certainly do another. Please contact Adam (adamfix@amwanorthcentral.org) or Angie (angieherron@amwanorthcentral.org) if you have any suggestions or ideas.

Call for Interviews!

“Member Moment” column is looking for members to be featured in upcoming editions of the Newsletter. If you are interested in being interviewed and sharing your career journey, insights, and a few personal tidbits, please reach out to Tess van Ee (tssvanee@gmail.com) to get on the interview list. This is a great way to get to know our vibrant community and we appreciate your participation!

FEATURE ARTICLES

North Central Book Club: 20 Years and Counting 

By Paul W. Mamula, PhD

2026 will be the 20th anniversary of the founding of our North Central Chapter Book Club. In December 2006, a group of us met at the Baker’s Square restaurant on University Avenue in Minneapolis to brainstorm ideas for revitalizing the chapter, suggest candidates for chapter officers, and brainstorm about potential meetings. Mary Knatterud suggested a book club as one way to have more meetings and volunteered to organize it. We decided 3 meetings a year, because too many meetings might deter those with busy schedules (and burn out the host). In 2007, our Book Club held the first of 3 meetings that year (January, April, and September). The last meeting had the bonus benefit of attendees being able to select titles for the upcoming year. Mary Knatterud wrote about the Book Club’s success a few years ago in a post in on the AMWA Engage and remained the coordinator until passing the baton in 2019.

Meeting Times and Places

Our first meetings were held at local restaurants at lunchtime. The businesses we chose did not mind if we dawdled over meals. Later, we tried to mix times, dates, and places to generate more attendance (with mixed results). Before the COVID pandemic , our meeting haunts were: Bakers Square (our first “home;” it now houses the Tea House on University Ave in Minneapolis); The Egg and I (nestled in an office complex in St Paul near the University’s Twin Cities campus); Mirror of Korea (St. Paul); Boca Chica (a family-run Mexican restaurant in St Paul ); and La Casita (in Roseville; a busy place where our animated discussions blended into the loud chatter).

The COVID pandemic forced us to switch to a virtual format, which increased attendance, although only temporarily. After the pandemic, we have experimented with at least 1 in-person meeting. Thus far in-person meetings have been held at the Lake Como Pavilion in St Paul, a pleasant backdrop in the fall. Holding meetings there also allows us to retreat to the covered plaza or the restaurant for inclement weather.

Notable Selections and Meetings

Most of the books selected have been nonfiction about medicine or writing and editing, but we have also recently included science fiction, biographies, medical history, technical manuals, a play, and even a book about olive oil. Readers can find our complete Book Club selections and recent notes in the Book Club section on the chapter website.

I started writing up Book Club Notes in 2011, after I had attended one of the first book club meetings but missing several subsequent ones, including several I was looking forward to. I thought the summaries would serve two purposes: an article for chapter members unable to attend and an additional article for the newsletter. (Those of us who have worked on the newsletter will admit that we are frequently short of content). Book Club Notes proved to be a long-lived feature appreciated by chapter members. Lynelle Martinez, a longtime chapter member told me at the AMWA meetings in San Diego in 2019 that she hadn’t been able to attend any of our book club meetings but that she always read the articles. Others have found the selections good additions to their reading lists and libraries.

Book Club Notes has also led to some spinoffs. In 2017, I suggested that any chapter member could write up a short article about a book (or books) for a new occasional feature, Read A Good Book? (see North Central Chapter - Newsletter: February 2024 for an example: The Icepick Surgeon by Sam Kean). Since then, the column has had several additional contributors who wrote short pieces about diverse topics. Books featured in these articles include books on grammar, sports, physical anthropology, anatomy and biomedical fiction.

Book Club Notes articles have occasionally generated other content, for example, an article about genetic information and its potential misuses touched on at the end of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (April 25, 2011). One can peruse our Newsletter Archive for other examples (Please note that we are still transitioning files to our new website, and not all newsletters are online. We hope to be able to update our archives.)

More Than Just a Book Club

Our book club continues to be more than just a meeting to talk about books. We have had authors speak at our meetings: Maryn McKenna graciously facilitated book club meetings that featured her books Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (April 28, 2008) and Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (September 26, 2011). The former title grew out of her work with the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the latter from her work with the Center for Infectious Research and Policy (whom she thanks in the acknowledgements). We were slated to have Jeffrey Matovic talk with us via telephone about Ticked: A Medical Miracle, a Friendship, and the Weird World of Tourette Syndrome, a book about deep brain stimulation for mitigating the disorder. (September 26, 2016). Unfortunately, he was ill, but his wife, Debra, spoke with us instead and graciously answered our questions. Jeff and Debra’s relationship and marriage form a touching section of Ticked. Debra (and Jeff) thanked us for the opportunity to speak with us and contributed to the editing that Book Club Notes selection.

The book club also serves at least 4 other purposes. First, it provides another meeting for members. Those not able to attend AMWA chapter meetings may be able to fit in an occasional book club meeting virtually. Second, it provides material that can be useful to one’s work (in the case of medical writing and editing books) and introduces topics and books of interest (in the case of fiction and unfamiliar fields). Third, the book club offers a chance to network with other members and make new professional contacts. Finally, it generates interest in reading. A recent article noted that over the past 2 decades (2003-2023) reading for pleasure dropped 40%.1 I once worked for a company whose CEO said he had not read a single book over the previous year! That is something that I cannot imagine.

More Reading

Join us if you can for our upcoming January book club meeting. Peruse our book club choices for books you may have missed. If you are still looking for ways to read more in your busy lives, some tips for finding titles are listed in Tina Jordan’s short article.2 The past 20 years has gone by fast, but we hope to continue to hold these meetings for as long as we can. Happy anniversary to us!

References

1.    Astor M. Study Finds Drop in Reading for Fun. The New York Times (National Edition) September 16, 2025, page D-6

2.    Jordan T. How to Be a Better Reader: Choose the Right Book. The New York Times (National Edition) August 13, 2019, page A-3

Book Club Selections for 2026

By Paul W. Mamula, PhD

We have selected our choices for 2026. Our selections are light-hearted but thought-provoking and a change of pace from our usual biomedical topics. The books include one mentioned in an earlier North Central newsletter and another by an author whose work we have read before. They offer something for everyone--fiction (ethnicity and the publishing industry), language (something writer always fret about), and biomedical science (with some thought-provoking questions):

January 26, 2026: Yellowface by RF Kuang

Yellowface is a satirical novel about writing and publishing. It relates the tale of June Hayward, a white author who takes her deceased Chinese American friend’s novel and gets it published as her own. The fictional book ‘s topic is a story about Asian Americans during World War I. The “fun” begins when June has trouble with her Korean American editor who thinks the book lacks a sufficient Asian perspective. Kuang is an Asian American author of multiple books of fantasy fiction, including Katabasis, her latest work. Those wishing a longer preview can see Read a Good Book? in the AMWA North Central Newsletter, April 2024.

April 27, 2026: Like: A History of the World’s Most Hated (and Misunderstood) Word by Megan C Reynolds

This book presents an examination of the word, “like.” “The word is a preposition, but it has taken on new meanings—just listen to current conversations and you can, like, see what I mean. As a boomer, it reminds me a lot of the use of the word, “man.” Both are used in many more ways—comma, exclamation, verb, to name a few. Like contains much more about the word, and it was also reviewed in The New York Times Book Review in the Sunday New York Times August 10, 2025, p 8.

September 28, 2026: Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach

Mary Roach’s latest book explores the advances and questions provoked in repairing the human body. Always interesting, Roach’s work provides multiple questions, only some of which have definitive answers. She has written many other single topic books (eg, Stiff [about cadavers], Bonk [sex], Grunt [soldiers], Fuzz [about nature], and Grunt [war]) as well as books about space travel (Packing for Mars) and the afterlife (Six Feet Over). At our January 26, 2015, book club meeting, we read her book, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal on (see AMWA North Central Newsletter Book Club Notes, February 2015 for a summary).

As always, one does not have to have read the book to attend. Everyone is welcome. Please note that 2026 is our 20th year of hosting the Book Club, so join us in celebrating it. Happy reading!

JOB BOARD

Announcements

Are you looking for work? You know someone who’s hiring? Please reach out! The job board will be updated in every issue of the monthly newsletter. If you’d like to add your name to this list, please contact Dora Miedaner (dora.miedaner@gmail.com).