These original songs are tuneful, witty, and eminently listenable.

13 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Gentle, KIDS/FAMILY: Kid Friendly



Details:
Originally produced in 1991 as a cassette tape, with the guidance and technical help of Jim Martin, Fabulous Realities is newly remastered and now available as a CD. It includes 11 original songs and two narrative poems. One song, "West Virginia Chose Me," has been recorded by a number of other performers and was also included on a special collection, "Songs of Home," produced in 2002 by the West Virginia Lottery. "Get Me to the Chocolate" is a perennial favorite with chocoholics everywhere, and has been used for the past few years as a "theme song" during West Virginia Public Radio's "Chocolate Challenge" fundraising effort.

Here's a sample of what people have said about Fabulous Realities:

"Colleen Anderson's self-produced collection of songs and poems is an eclectic mix of styles and emotions, and she is fluent in all of them." - Dirty Linen Magazine

"My whole family enjoys Fabulous Realities, which we always bring along on our long car trips." - Nancy Mattei, MA

"Your music touches a place deep in my soul. Please keep putting into verse and song what so many of us feel but can't find the words to express." - Mary Lee Scalf, VA

"Every song means something personal to me." - Beverly Walter, WV

BIO INFO ABOUT COLLEEN: Colleen Anderson is a designer, performer, workshop leader, and writer. She owns Mother Wit Writing and Design, a creative studio in Charleston. She performs frequently with guitarist George Castelle and also with Julie Adams and Karen Vuranch.

As a designer, Anderson has some 30 years of experience, including 17 years as designer of Goldenseal, the stateâs folklife magazine, for which she has also been a contributing writer. Her designs have won awards from West Virginia Communicators and the National Federation of Press Women.

For more than 20 years, Anderson has led creative writing workshops in West Virginia, including many weeklong and eight-week workshops for teen and adult writers, respectively. With Julie Adams, she has led several workshops that concentrated on folk song and songwriting at Michigan State University. She and Adams are also co-leaders of an annual weeklong songwriting workshop at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

Andersonâs songs have been featured on Public Radio Internationalâs Mountain Stage and The Folk Sampler, and she has produced two albums of original songs, Fabulous Realities (1991) and Going Over Home (2001). Her song âWest Virginia Chose Meâ is included in several anthology recordings of West Virginia music, and two others have won the FOOTMAD songwriting contest and qualified for the semi-finals in the Mountain Stage NewSong performing songwriter competition.

Andersonâs other published and/or broadcast writing includes six years of editorial copywriting for the stateâs official travel guide, West Virginia Wild & Wonderful (honored as the Best State Travel Guide in 2005); restaurant reviews for Mid-Atlantic Country Magazine; more than 100 essays for West Virginia Public Radio, two of which won national awards; and dozens of short stories and poems, including publications in Redbook, Arts & Letters, Kestrel, Antietam Review, and others. Her article âA Pawpaw Primerâ has been chosen for inclusion in Cornbread Nation III: The Best of Southern Food Writing. Andersonâs writing has earned two $3,500 artist fellowships from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts (1994, playwriting, and 2000, nonfiction). She recently received an invitation to spend three months at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation artistsâ retreat in Taos, NM beginning in January 2007.