Jamie Berger
lives in Turners with Anja , Mec, and Bo. He is a student in the MFA writing program at UMass Amherst, where he also teaches eager frosh to write. He was Raised in Albany, NY, and overeducated in and by New York City, after which he lived in San Francisco for a long time. His first book is Bo's Arts (Evil Twin Publications, 2006). He and Daniel Oppenheimer maintain a blog called, of all things, Masculinity and its Discontents (M.A.I.D.) that can be found at valleyadvocate.com or, more directly, at man-ifesto.com. More of his words are available at jamiebergerwords.com. He has bartended on and off and on and off since 1988 in New York, at the now long defunct Marlin Café, and in San Francisco at the Make Out Room, The Latin American Club, The Elbo Room, and for one brief, joyous season, serving Zima and Malibu and Cokes at office Christmas parties aboard Hornblower Cruise ships in the San Francisco Bay.

Emily Brewster
is a proud member of the Montague legislative body known as Town Meeting, representing precinct 5. She is a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster, and is therefore the most widely read author you're likely to encounter, unless you meet, say, Solomon. She admires the syntactic structures in Kelis' "My Milkshake" and can elucidate between three and seven ways in which "I feel you" has contributed to her native tongue. Her party tricks include, but are not limited to, saying the books of the Bible in one breath and a mean Brooklyn accent. A connoisseur, but by no means totaller, of tea, she managed a coffee store back in the day, which, while not exactly preparing her to own a bar, also did not preclude her years of research as a bar patron, which, she asserts, should not be underestimated.

Christopher Janke
learned to open an egg in each hand in 1994 at Steve's Beale St. Diner. After Steve's father won the Nobel Prize in economics, Janke was fired and lost that skill. However, he learned a great deal about good cheap food from Gerry, who surprised his own mother with a birth weight of 18 pounds, at Gennaro's Eatery, a popular pasta and pizza joint in Quincy, Massachusetts, the City of Presidents. Janke learned a lot about what not to do from a Culinary Institute graduate who spiked the cafeteria brownies with weed while in school. In 1996, when Janke was hired to be the Executive Chef at the Old Yarmouth Inn, he was surprised and concerned that the restaurant had its opening planned only 3 days hence and had no food and had not hired anyone else but Hermano, the dishwasher who did not speak English. He helped them open on time, ran the place for a summer, and left the kitchen to learn how to write poetry. Recently, he's been writing and running a laundromat and doing some business consulting. His first book, The Structure of the Embryonic Rat Brain, is out on Fence Books. He lives in Turners with his wife, renowned lexicographer Emily Brewster.

Mark Wisnewski
is a Greenfield, MA town councilor and Barkeep at the People's Pint. Previously, he was a potter, reservist, loan officer, bar manager, karate instructor, short-order cook, dishwasher, carpenter, army officer, librarian, store manager, special-ed teacher, emt, gift shop owner, bouncer, and bank teller. However, he has never been a dentist. He is a UMass grad (English). He's been been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king. He's been up and down and over and out and he knows one thing: each time he finds himself flat on his face, he picks himself up and gets back in the race. He believes that that's life, but hopes not to find himself flat on his face in the Rendezvous very often, if ever. He lives in Greenfield with his wife Francia and sons Luke Armando and Corin Louis.