When Karin Finell moved to Santa Barbara in 1985, she immersed herself in its literary community, opening her home to other writers as a meeting place to offer feedback on one another’s work. Her party at the close of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference became a memorable event that gave conference goers a place to unwind.
As a child in Germany before the war years, the extraordinary events in Karin’s life began early. She worked on her memoirs to chronicle those events in Santa Barbara, where she found ongoing support as a writer. She’d first attended the Writers Conference in the mid-1980s, and the connections made there proved to be a boon to her writing career. She became friends with conference founders Mary and Barnaby Conrad, as well as many other local literati.
Karin taught a class at Santa Barbara City College’s adult education program, “Writing Your Pain, Writing Your Grief,” to help people deal with loss. Because she’d been a friend of Anaïs Nin, Karin organized a commemoration through adult ed in 2003: “Anaïs Nin: 100 Years — A Writer, a Life.”
