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Centerville resident joins literary club’s elite

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By Katherine Ullmer, Staff Writer 2:14 PM Thursday, June 18, 2009

CENTERVILLE — At the May 7 meeting of Dayton’s Woman’s Literary Club, held at the Dayton Country Club in Oakwood, Centerville resident Celia Elliott, 86, became the fourth Writer Laureate in the club’s 110-year history.

The club was founded in 1889, with 125 charter members.

“It is our most prestigious award,” said club president Tracy Bieser.

Other winners of the club’s Writer Laureate distinction have been Ellen Jane Lorenz Porter, June Lauzon and Lois Hager, she said.

“It took me about 40 years,” said Elliott, a club member since 1963.

To win the award, members have to have written four first-place winning manuscripts in each of four different categories: drama, essay or other prose, poetry, and short story in the club’s annual writing contests, she said.

Elliott has been an award-winning writer in the annual contest almost every year since joining the group, said Rebecca Cress-Ingebo, creative writing chairman for the group, which has about 45 active members and 25 associates.

“I really felt honored to receive the award,” Elliott said.

She has loved writing since childhood. “It’s a compulsion,” she said. In high school she wrote for the school paper.

She grew up in Centerville and knows the community’s history intimately, having written five or six books for the Centerville-Washington Twp. Historical Society, along with its newsletter. “I haven’t made much money, but it’s been fun,” she said.

She does occasional free lance work and replaced Erma Bombeck as a columnist for the Kettering-Oakwood Times for several years after Bombeck left.

Slow and easy has always worked for her, Elliott said. She didn’t earn her bachelor of arts degree from the University of Dayton until 1986, though she started working on her degree in 1941. World War II and a family interrupted things, but “I always promised my mother (now deceased) that I would finish my college,” she said.

Her 2009 winning short story, which clinched the Writer Laureate title for her, “Another April,” is about a little girl living with her grandparents who gets accused of stealing at a jewelry store, but ends up being exonerated, Elliott said.

This story also won the Ellen Jane Lorenz Porter Grand Prize Award for the year.

Elliott also won an honorable mention for the essay “Caveat Emptor,” a second place poetry award for “Tree of Life,” and a second place short story award for “Making Do,” in this year’s writing contest.

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