On February 22, 2023, Palm Harbor lost one of its quiet pillars. Deanna J. Bennett, author of the Anna Immigration Trilogy and founder of a writers’ group that helped a lot of us become better at the work, passed away at seventy-seven. I knew her as the person at the head of the table, the one who ran the room I came to for years. This is a thank-you to a fellow writer who taught me something every time I sat down with her.
How We Met
I found Deanna the way you find most good things in this field, by looking.
I was searching for a critique group, and hers kept coming up. The East Lake Writers’ Workshop met in Palm Harbor, close enough to me to be worth the trip, in one of the side rooms at the East Lake Community Library. It’s a good library with a few of those quiet rooms off to the side, and that’s where we gathered, every other week.
The format was simple and it worked. We sat around a table, each of us read a few pages aloud, and then the group talked it through. Deanna founded the group in 2004 and ran it for years, and she ran it well. Everyone got their turn. Nobody hijacked the room. She kept the room moving without ever seeming to push.
The Critique That Was Worth Hearing
Most critique groups fixate on commas. You bring in three pages of your soul and walk out with notes about semicolons. Deanna’s group wasn’t like that, and that was her doing.
Her critiques were fair and they were interesting. She didn’t hunt for punctuation and grammar the way so many groups do. She cared about the craft, the historical grounding, and whether the writing was any good. That focus is rarer than it should be, and it’s the difference between a group that polishes your typos and one that makes you a better writer. Hers made you better.
She was sharp and honest, but she delivered it in a quiet voice that carried more weight than volume ever does, and she was encouraging to the newer writers who showed up unsure of themselves.
The Story of Anna
The thing that fascinated me most was Anna. Deanna was retired, and she spent the bulk of her time on those books, the Anna Immigration Trilogy. What made it stick with me is that it was a true story, drawn from her own grandmother’s life: a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl crossing the Atlantic in steerage in 1914, going through Ellis Island, and building a life in a country that didn’t always want her there.
I spent many hours at that table critiquing her Anna chapters, and everybody else’s pages too. Hearing the research and the history come out week after week was its own kind of education.
She knew what it took to put a real person’s experience on the page without flattening it, and she did the homework that most writers skip. The trilogy, Anna: Going to America, Anna: American Journey, and Anna: American Dream, was a tribute to her grandmother and to everyone who made that crossing. Her family’s memorial for her is at Curlew Hills, and her Anna books remain in print.
Why I Eventually Drifted
I went to that group for a good while, and it was time well spent. The only reason I stopped was the drive. The meetings landed in the thick of the day’s traffic, and getting across to Palm Harbor at those hours kept getting harder until it wasn’t practical anymore. I still made it back a few times after that, because the table was worth the trip even when the road wasn’t.
That’s the real shape of it. We weren’t lifelong friends. We were a group leader and a member who respected the hell out of how she ran her room and what she knew about writing. Some of the best people you meet in this work are the ones who simply do it well and make space for you to do it too. Deanna was one of those.
What She Left Behind
Deanna kept writing to the end. After her husband Tom died in 2018, she wrote The Year of Firsts, a memoir of the year that followed. In 2022 she published Anna’s Daughter, finishing the memoir her mother, Helen Dragunas, had started, and in it she told what became of the real Anna. She founded a group that outlived its early years and helped writers who never got the chance to thank her properly. I’m one of them, so I’ll do it here.
She proved something just by how she worked: that you can lead without raising your voice, that craft outweighs catching commas, and that a real story told with care is worth more than a clever one told carelessly. The writers who passed through her table carry a little of that with them. I know I do. Rest well, Deanna. The table you built mattered, and so did you.
Share Your Deanna Story
If you knew Deanna, sat at her table, read one of the Anna books, or were helped along by her at some point, I’d like to hear about it. Leave a comment below or reach out to me directly.
Share a memory, a line of hers that stuck, or what her group meant to you. Her story keeps going in the writers she encouraged.
