Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Simple Living America, our partner nonprofit membership organization, has just gone live at www.getsatisfied.org with its new Get Satisfied campaign! The cornerstone is a book coming out this October from Easton Studio Press called “Get Satisfied: How Twenty People Like You Found the Satisfaction of Enough.” Leave it to my great friend Carol Holst to find a way to bring many diverse voices from the mainstream to the simple living field.

Carol and the Simple Living America standing committee – including Michael Beck, Maria Hodkins, Stan King, Jill Young and Sarajane Hall – put out a writers’ call for strategic submissions to the book a few months ago. Believe me, they haven’t been the same since, digging out from under an avalanche of personal stories about The Satisfaction of Enough. Bill McKibben says, “This is the book we really need, the one that cuts to the core.” Ed Begley, Jr. calls it the start of a satisfaction movement in America; what a concept!

Carol thinks that a family at her church actually made the whole thing take off. She’s been friends with Terry and Howard Richman for years and admired their daughters, Heather and Rachel, who were just leaving Sunday School age when she started teaching it for fifteen years. It turns out that Heather, now married, has formed a web design and marketing company with her husband called Ripe Media. And it turns out that Ripe Media has partnered with east coast publisher David Wilk to form BookTrix, a future-oriented conduit to the world of book publishing. Soon a Random House book designer was on the “Get Satisfied” team and distribution for the book was arranged through Perseus Books Group. It seems that The Satisfaction of Enough was positioned for mainstream audiences because of a little church nestled in the mountains of Los Angeles.

So check out the new website, with the world’s easiest posting area for new stories of satisfaction and simplicity, like yours! And watch for the compelling book, with a Foreword by Dr. Peter Whybrow, Director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. It’s a marvelous collection whose time has come!