West Seattle author Lisa Haneberg is looking for a little help as she gets ready to lead a group of local seniors in writing their life stories for family, friends, and posterity. Here’s her request:

I will be volunteering at the West Seattle Senior Center teaching a group of senior writers how to create a self-published print-on-demand book of their stories or memoir. At the end of the class, all participants will have created a book on Lulu.com that they can share with family and friends.

As you might imagine, some of the class participants struggle with the technology issues involved in this process. Some don’t type or don’t type well. Some don’t understand how to save their work onto a disk or thumb drive. Some are very unfamiliar and uncomfortable with using the internet.

This is where you come in. I could use a few mentors to help out with the class. I am looking for people who are willing to volunteer a bit of their time to help clear some of these technology-related hurdles. The kind of help I am looking for is:

People who are willing to do some typing and/or proofreading.
People who can help with file saving, transfer, formatting in Word. Also turning a Word doc into a PDF.
People who are willing to attend a couple of the classes (when we work in the computer room) and help mentor people on the internet (navigating the Lulu.com site).
Someone who can scan typed pages into an editable text file.

The class will begin on January 28th and will run through March. Most of the internet related work will occur in late February and early March. The typing and WORD work will occur in February. The class is held on Monday afternoons. You can see information about the class posted here: www.sc-ws.org/janfeb08/7.html. You do not need to be able to attend classes to volunteer. Much of the work can be done behind the scenes and at a time that suits you.

Along with all the good karma that would come from volunteering on this project, you can learn more about how to self-publish a book.

If you would like more information or if you are willing to help, please contact me at: lhaneberg (at) gmail.com or 206-954-2953.