Western Friend/ Friends Bulletin Corporation Board

Western Friend is published by the Friends Bulletin Corporation, an independent 501 (c)(3) non-profit established jointly by Pacific, North Pacific and Intermountain Yearly Meetings. While Western Friend is the official publication of these three Yearly Meetings, the opinions expressed within the magazine or on this website are those of the authors, not of the Meetings.

Friends Bulletin Corporation’s Board of Directors is comprised of three members each from the three Yearly Meetings. The board meets three times a year, rotating between the regions of the Yearly Meetings. Meetings are typically hosted by a local Friends Meeting, and local Friends are more than encouraged to spend time with the board and staff!

Meet the Board

Pacific Yearly Meeting (California, Nevada, Hawai’i, Guatemala, Mexico City)

SANDY FARLEY is a member of Palo Alto Meeting in Pacific YM. As an ESL teacher, she is intimately acquainted with and amused by the quirks of the English language. She has served as recording clerk for several Friends organizations including her monthly, quarterly, and yearly meeting. She has served on the board of Quaker Earthcare Witness [when it was FCUN] She is the principal author and illustrator of Earthcare for Children. She is a storyteller and essayist whose writings have appeared in Friends Journal and Friends Bulletin.

A lifelong Friend, STEPHEN MATCHETT has been a member of San Francisco Monthly Meeting since 1982, serving over the years as clerk and in various other capacities. After more than a decade representing state prisoners in California’s appellate courts, he recently laid down his legal practice and is devoting much of his time to conducting nonviolence trainings in prisons and on the outside with the Alternatives to Violence Project. When the opportunity arises, he also finds great fulfillment in making presentations to Friends and others on reading early Quaker writers and the Bible, a subject with which he is obsessed.

ROB ROY WOODMAN was on the PYM Friends Bulletin Committee and became clerk as Friends Bulletin sought support from the sister Yearly Meetings so that Friends Bulletin could incorporate. He shepherded Friends Bulletin through the editorship of Nancy Yarnall and the first year of Anthony Manousos’. Rob Roy was for many years on the Ministry and Oversight committee of College Park Quarterly Meeting and was clerk for three years. He was one of the developers of the State of the Meeting Workshop. He is currently clerk of Davis Friends Meeting. Rob Roy is a neuropsychologist in private practice in Davis, California and a core member of Dandelion Dance Theater.

North Pacific Yearly Meeting (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana)

JONATHAN BROWN is a member of University Friends Meeting and an attender at South Seattle Preparative Meeting. In addition to the board of Western Friend, he was recently appointed to the NPYM Steering Committee; this reflects his interest in increasing his meeting’s exposure to and involvement in the wider world of Western unprogrammed Friends. He has served on various committees of his meeting, as well as on the boards of the Friends Committee on National Legislation and the Friends Committee on Washington (State) Public Policy. He works as a computer programmer. He is married (spiritually, but not yet legally) and has two young sons.

JESSICA MANLY BUCCIARELLI is a member of Bridge City Friends Meeting in her hometown, Portland, Oregon. She is a past member of Strawberry Creek Monthly Meeting (Berkeley, California) and Orange Grove Monthly Meeting (Pasadena, California). Her current or past associations with Friends organizations include Earlham School of Religion, Quaker Lesbian Conference, Pastoral Care Newsletter and Ben Lomond Quaker Center. Currently employed by Portland’s transit agency, Jessica has in the past worked for herself, for small nonprofits and for a university. Her career involves publications, communication and organization development.

JEAN HAND TRIOL joined Friends at age 13. She is a member of the Glacier Valley Worship Group which is under the care of Missoula Meeting. She edited the Montana Gathering of Friends Newsletter for 7 years and is now the Corresponding Clerk for that quarterly meeting. She is fluent in German and recently retired from a career in cytopathology. Her watercolors have graced the pages of Friends Bulletin and the cover of the EarthLight book.

Intermountain Yearly Meeting (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, bits of Texas)

POLLY KMETZ is a member of Phoenix Monthly Meeting in Intermountain Yearly Meeting. She has served as recording clerk for the two meetings of which she has been a member (Phoenix and Beacon Hill in Boston) and as clerk of Beacon Hill Monthly Meeting. Currently, she is clerk of Phoenix Meeting’s Ministry and Adult Religious Education and Nominating Committees. She is an editor of textbooks, trade books, and other publications and projects across a broad spectrum of disciplines. She is also a yoga practitioner and teacher.

PETER ANDERSON is a member of Durango Monthly Meeting. He graduated with an MDiv from Earlham School of Religion where he subsequently taught writing for several years. Currently, he teaches English at Adams State College and publishes Pilgrimage Magazine near his home in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. He is the author of a dozen children’s books on themes related to nature, history, and the American West as well as a collection of essays, First Church of the Higher Elevations–Mountains, Prayer, and Presence (Denver; Ghost Road Press; 2005). and lives on the western edge of Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo Range with his wife Grace and two daughters, Rosalea and Caroline.

MARIA MELENDEZ is a member of Logan Monthly Meeting in Utah. She has published two collections of poetry: the chapbook Base Pairs (Swan Scythe Press, 2001) and How Long She’ll Last in This World (University of Arizona Press, 2006), which received Honorable Mention at the 2007 International Latino Book Awards and was named a finalist for the 2007 PEN Center USA Literary Awards. Her essays and features appear in Altar, Orion Afield, and Isotope, and several of her essays on arts and activism have been broadcast as part of NPR’s American Democracy Project. She co-coordinates Poetas y Pintores: Artists Conversing with Verse, a traveling exhibition of contemporary Latino art and poetry. Her own poetry and fiction appear in such magazines as Barrow Street, International Quarterly, and Ecological Restoration, and she has edited two anthologies of poetry by poet-teachers and K-12 students for California Poets in the Schools. She received her M.A. in English/Creative Writing from UC Davis in 2000. From 2000-2003 she was awarded grants from the California Arts Council in support of her work as writer-in-residence at the U.C. Davis Arboretum, where she taught environmental writing workshops for the public. In 2003, Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, appointed her Research Fellow at the Center for Women’s InterCultural Leadership. She currently lives in Logan, Utah, where she teaches creative writing and American literature at Utah State University. Her next collection of poetry is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in Spring 2010.