"Silicon Valley needs to realize that there are people using their creative minds for something other than building computers," she says.

Now, with a rotating membership several dozen strong, the group is going to the next step by hosting its first guest speaker: novelist Beth Proudfoot, who will discuss the finer points of writers conferences on July 28 at 7:30 p.m.

This kind of information is news even to Johnson, who had little publishing experience before starting the writers group. "I'm an organizer," she says. "I do writing for business and marketing, but the people I meet with are real writers." Members of her group run the gamut, from an author specializing in women in aviation who's editing her next book, to a physician looking to write about his profession.

For now, the club meets at free local venues such as the Sunny View Retirement Community, but Johnson hopes to take Powerful Pens to the rest of the Silicon Valley. She continues to actively recruit with plans to eventually expand to television, where the club's normal activities—reading aloud and discussion—would take place on a larger scale.

Johnson says her current membership has been so happy with the group's setup that they don't want her to bring in more people. "People have become attached to the meetings," she says. "The people who come don't leave." She is also encouraging sharing and critique over a club-wide email list, but the interaction that comes from the face-to-face meetings is hard to replace. "There's something that sparks when they come to the meeting," she says.

That's why, Johnson says, it was vital to begin bringing in guest speakers. "Beth is the first, but definitely not the last," she says. Proudfoot is the director of the East of Eden Writers Conference taking place August 27 to 29 in Salinas, so Johnson is encouraging networking in order to entice her membership to go.

Johnson herself is a little skittish of writing serious fiction, though she's thinking about taking some classes or giving a biography a shot. But in the end, it'll likely take a leap of faith similar to the one she had to take to start the group in the first place. "It gives me an opportunity to create and try something I've never done before," she says.

The Powerful Pens Writers Group meets the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month. The presentation by Beth Proudfoot will begin at 7:30 p.m. on July 28. For more information on the meeting or the group, contact Patricia Johnson at pjohnson@ rcare.com or at 408.861.1247.