Help us relocate the geraniums to their new home in our window boxes and give aid and solace to our front flower beds. Both brains and brawn are needed .
Thursday
After Dinner
Writers' Night Out
Memoir Workshop& Writers' Night Out
This Thursday will be the final session of the Memoir series with Rebecca Mahoney. This will begin promptly at 3 pm.
We have begun a waiting list to offer this series again. If you are interested, let Alison know.
At 5 pm, Writers' Night Out will feature a baked potato bar and salad. Come meet Jessie and Levi (if you haven't yet).
After dinner, Alison will give a short presentation on breaks within chapters.
THEN stay for a bit, so we can go outside to PLANT.
Village Writers--Stronger & Better Together
Thirty-eight storytellers from 11 communities relax in the parlor car on their train ride, which was part of the Village Writing School's Tales on the Rails event held Sunday in Rogers.
Paula Morell, Executive Producer of Tales from the South, inspires the trainload of storytellers.
Doesn’t Everybody?
by Pat Carr
I once introduced a friend to my mother with, “This is Bob Lewis.”
He corrected immediately, “That’s Dr. Lewis. I have a Ph.D.,” to which my mother, who had a high school diploma, said haughtily, “Doesn’t everybody?”
Every time a writer tells me he/she sees no reason for going to a writers’ workshop because he/she already has a book published, I really want to say, “Doesn’t everybody?”
I’m not my mother and would never say it, and I do understand the question of why published writers should even consider a writers’ workshop. Well, for starters, to join a group of like-minded souls who love what every writer loves—words. No matter if an author is a novice dreaming about writing someday or is someone who’s been writing for years and may even be established, each one wants to reach a reader who understands. And there’s no better place to find readers than among the ranks of those who also write.
Thirty years ago, I joined a group called the International Women’s Writing Guild, which held a writing conference in Saratoga Springs, New York every summer. I’d already won the Iowa Short Fiction Award—at the time the only prestigious award for short fiction out there—with my story collection The Women in the Mirror, so I was published. And one of the instructors. But this writing group of around three hundred women was largely experimental and democratic, so all instructors also attended the other workshops. There was no ranking of the new and the seasoned writer, and some women were such absolute beginners that they’d never heard of a scene. But they could learn. And they could contribute.
And since scores of women came to the critique sessions in the evenings that Barbara Kingsolver and I held, everyone could hear the reactions of the listener/readers to a work and everyone could benefit from comments of both established and newly hatched writers. It was with Barbara that I heard for the first time that the opening sentence of a piece of fiction should promise what the story will deliver. She couldn’t remember where she learned that particular bit of advice, but we both wished we’d received it before we ever started writing.
Another reason for even the best writers to consider a workshop is that there we can test out ideas and theories among our tribe, our guild. All writers have individual work habits, individual strengths, and I think it’s as valuable to know Hemingway’s technique of stopping in mid-sentence to jump start his next day’s writing as it is to know his theory that if the writer is conscious of a tragedy, he needn’t mention it in the story for the reader to sense it as well. What better place to exchange prompts and methods than among the committed, who want what we want from the printed page.
So you have a published book. Doesn’t everybody? You can still learn something new. Maybe even at a writing workshop.
LAST WEEK IN PICTURES
Progress on Exterior
Stucco on the front and back of the building got refurbished this past week.
Sneak Peek
Larry Mansker's gorgeous sign is finished and ready to go up over the porch as soon as the stucco is cured.
Last Thursday at Writers' Night Out, Carole Parker, a new Eureka resident, gave us insights into the life of a Hollywood screenwriter.
The mission of the Village Writing School is to foster a vibrant literary community in Northwest Arkansas and to provide resources for ALL writers who seek to improve their craft.
