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Tuesday, February 6, 2018
The Basement, 21 Center Street
(Down the drive, in back of building, next to the Northampton Police Department)
Northampton, MA
7:00 to 9:00 p.m.
Featured Reader: Ruth Lehrer
Ruth Lehrer is a writer and sign language interpreter living in western Massachusetts. Her writing has been published in journals such as Lilith, Jubilat, and Trivia: Voices of Feminism. Her poetry chapbook, Tiger Laughs When You Push, is available from Headmistress Press. Her debut young adult novel, Being Fishkill (Candlewick Press, 2017) is described by Entertainment Weekly as, “...the year’s most heartwarming, heartbreaking teen novel.” Ruth can be found at ruthlehrer.com and you can read this wonderful feature about her in the Gazette.
Doors open at 7 - with an Open Mic. If you'd like a chance to read, place your name in the hat up until 7:10. Ten names will be randomly selected. The reading starts at 7:15, and each reader will have five minutes.
Admission is free; participants are encouraged to buy a drink (alcohol and non-alcohol available) and tip well in support of the venue.
Please join us!
Further information: Beth Filson at wno@strawdogwriters.org
SAVE THE DATE
Featured Reader for March 6 - Tzivia Gover
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Words at the Mic!
A new challenge for people who attend
Writers Night Out
Each month, host and MC Jacqueline and Beth will select words or phrases from those we hear during the open mic. We’re listening for whatever strikes our fancy, and that we hope will get your Muse talking. We will announce the phrase at the end of the presentations.
Your challenge is to use those exact words, or phrase, in a poem, short story, or prose piece -- no more than 500 words -- and submit it by the 15th of the month. That gives you about two weeks.
To get us started, the phrase chosen for the first Words at the Mic Challenge is, "My brother's curse."
Make sure your name is on your submission. In the subject line of your email, put Words at the Mic Challenge!
The winning submission will be chosen by anonymous vote, and will be read at the next Writers Night Out. It will also appear in the SDWG month-end circular. Send to Beth Filson at wno@strawdogwriters.org. This contest is open only to those who attend Writers Night Out.
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Are you curious about world building? Do your characters inhabit living rooms in the future, or trek miles at the turn of the century? Setting connects readers to a narrative and is part of the allure that transports them from one place to another, but setting is so much more than the streets our characters walk down, the oceans they swim. In this Read like a Writer program we’ll use short stories and novel excerpts to examine setting and explore how writers use it to establish the worlds in which their protagonists live, foreshadow plot, create mood and tone, and reveal psychological traits. We’ll work on a passage of our own to see how different approaches to setting can add various layers to our work. This session is good for beginning and established writers who want to develop revision strategies to make their fictional worlds breathe.
 Jennifer Jacobson is the Director of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and the Juniper Institute for Young Writers. She is also the Associate Director of the MFA for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst. She founded the non-profit organization When Children Save the Day to unite language arts and social action. Her work has been honored with a Creative Teaching Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the National Storytelling Network’s Brimstone Award for transformative community projects, along with support from the Solidago Foundation and the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts. Her short story “Heat” received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train, and “Trouble and Bones” was a Tennessee Williams Festival’s Fiction contest finalist. Jennifer teaches creative writing at Smith College’s Young Women’s Writing Workshop and, with Voices From Inside, created the Family Storybook Project curriculum for incarcerated women and their children.
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Co-sponsored by:
Straw Dog Writers Guild and Nan Parati (owner, Elmer's Store and the Inn at Norton Hill)
Featured Reader: Erik Sherman
Erik is an independent journalist, author, consultant, and playwright. His work covering business, technology, economics, finance, law, science, and public policy has appeared in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Inc, and Technology Review. Mr. Sherman is a regular contributor to the online sites of Inc and Forbes and he is the author or co-author of ten non-fiction books. MORE
Here's how it works: The featured writer reads recent work and describes the journey to publication, followed by Q & A. Then the floor opens to other writers, who read for five minutes each. If you want to read, put your name in the hat before 3:15. (Hint: you get five minutes.)
Hosted by Jane Roy Brown
INTERESTED IN BEING A FEATURED READER?
please email Jane Roy Brown at brownjaneroy@gmail.com
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A benefit for our members
We began accepting applications on January 1, 2018
A Straw Dog Writing Residency includes 6 days, 5 nights, starting Sunday at 3:00 pm through Friday noon, in one of the lovely, unique places at Patchwork Farm Retreat in Westhampton MA.
Residencies are self-guided and residents provide their own meals, with access to cooking facilities. Costs of accommodation are covered by a grant from a generous Straw Dog member.
More information HERE
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Come listen to presenter Marya Zilberberg discuss how to break down the barriers and put Twitter, blogs and other online formats to work. Social media seem to be a necessity for marketing anything in the 21st century. But are they? What are the best approaches for a writer? We will discuss some of the successful strategies and potential pitfalls of this brave new communication ecosystem.
Marya is a physician-health services researcher living in Western Massachusetts. In addition to over 120 academic articles, she has authored the book Between the Lines: Finding the Truth in Medical Literature, which, thanks to her blogging and tweeting, is used by many residency programs as a textbook of evaluative medicine. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Six Hens, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Cleaver, Vox Poetica, The Blue Hour and Boston Poetry Magazine, among others. If you want to follow Marya on Twitter, her handle is @murzee.
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A Message from the Straw Dog Steering Committee:
We are delighted to report that the Straw Dog Writers Guild poetry anthology, Compass Roads, is moving along on schedule for a mid-April launch.
It’s the first time Straw Dogs has done this and we ran into some problems with our submission process. If you submitted poems and did not receive an email about your submission, please contact Laura Stone at admin@strawdogwriters.org immediately. We apologize deeply for omissions and confusion.
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We’re calling it The March Medley. During March, we will present four Sunday writing workshops, 1-3 p.m. led by Dori Ostermiller (March 4), Becky Jones (March 11), Meryl Cohn (March 18), and Pamela Means (March 25).
It is a collaborative series with the Northampton Center for the Arts.
More information to follow.
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 At the recent Straw Dog Writers’ Guild roundtable on writing for social justice, we were asked to consider our biggest fear in writing work that challenges the status quo. Make the fear a character, Liz Bedell suggested, and have a conversation with it.
Primed by reading and hearing aloud the words of Patricia Smith’s poem “The Undertaker,” my Fear asks me straightaway, “Who did the poem bring to mind?”
“Darryl,” I reply. “Anthony. Saint. Carl.” All Black men I’ve known personally who died violently and way too early. The memory of Carl is especially haunting, as, of the four, he was the youngest and his was the only funeral I attended. His face in death registered a look of surprise and worry that no undertaker’s skill could disguise. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Our writing time up, we share our thoughts. In this group of a dozen or so people I’ve mostly just met for the first time, there’s caution in the air. We’re expressing our doubts, our suspicions, our wounds. We choose words carefully. We listen closely. I don’t share Carl, Saint, Anthony, and Darryl; rather, I speak of the hesitation I’ve felt contemplating writing the story of an enslaved woman in 1700s upstate New York. We barely scratch the surface, but it is such an important surface to scratch.
I find myself thinking back on the discussion frequently, and also encountering the same questions in other contexts. In a fiction writers group on Facebook, a White writer asks for feedback about whether she should write a flash fiction piece she is imagining from the point of view of a Black woman experiencing micro-aggression. Most respondents agree that she should, taking care to do her research thoroughly, write honestly, and seek beta readers who are women of color.
A few days later I happen upon J. D. Myall’s interview of novelist Nic Stone in an old issue of Writers’ Digest. Stone quotes Toni Morrison, who offers a standard: “The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”
I’m looking forward to our next roundtable. I hope we can deepen the scratch, and continue to explore how we can best contend with fears—our own and those of others—and test our power as writers.
- Jan Maher
January, 2018 |
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In response to the overwhelming interest in peer-led critique groups expressed at the Annual Meeting, Straw Dog Writers Guild is offering a service to help writers create these groups.
Although SDWG cannot sponsor the groups, we offer:
•a web page with guidelines for starting and maintaining supportive and constructive critique groups
•a new writing group directory, to help writers find potential group members in their genre and/or geographical area, which can be accessed after reading the guidelines
•an experienced critique writer to attend the first meeting of new groups to offer suggestions and support.
This directory is open to both members and nonmembers in order to join and connect writers and create new peer led writing groups.
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Midwinter Fire: Poems of Midlife
A reading and discussion by Gail Thomas, Leslea Newman, and Joy Ladin, as part of the library's reading series.
Where the Real and the Surreal Meet
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
7:00pm - 8:45pm
FORBES LIBRARY
Coolidge Museum
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POETRY FOR TRUTH: ANCIENT AND NEW
All are welcome to attend a free poetry workshop, Sat. Jan. 20, 2-4pm, Springfield Central Library Community Room 220 State St.
From thousands of years ago through today, poets have been advocating for freedom, justice, and social transformation in words and in actions. Including movement, meditation, free writing, and sharing work aloud, this workshop will explore the poetic and energetic offerings of truth-seekers, ancient and new. Open to everyone – all levels, all experiences. No writing or movement experience required.
For more info & to register by Jan 16th: www.truthschool.org
INSTRUCTOR: Janet E. Aalfs, poet laureate emeritus of Northampton, MA, and founder/director of Lotus Peace Arts at Valley Women's Martial Arts, has been sharing weavings of poetry and martial arts-based interpretive movement for 40 years. The workshop will include writing and sharing aloud (optional) as well as simple meditative movement.
WRITERS IN PROGRESS NEW WORKSHOPS 2018
The Anatomy of a Giggle: Humor and Writing Funny, with Molly Burnham
 Most people believe that we are either funny or not funny, by design. I believe that like any other aspect of craft, humor can be learned, and it just takes awareness and practice. In this hands-on, half-day workshop, we will set aside our judgments and explore our funny bones. We’ll discuss various types of humor, learn key points to writing funny, and engage in exercises that encourage the playful, humorous side of our brains. Bring an open mind, a pad of paper, and your joyful self, and leave with a fresh approach to humor!
Saturday, January 20th 9:00 am – 12:30 pm ($75) Register Now
Molly B. Burnham, author of the Teddy Mars Series and 2016 recipient of the Sid Fleishman Humor Award, holds a Masters in Elementary Ed. and an MFA in Writing for Children. Find out more about her at www.mollybburnham.com
January Re-Boot Camp, with Diana Gordon:
 Are you sick of not sticking to your writing resolutions? Does email eat up your writing time? Have you not yet finished that novel (memoir, essay, book of poems,) because you lack a plan or can’t stick to the one you have? Diana Gordon’s six-week January Re-Boot Camp is designed to help writers re-order their lives to prioritize creative work, so that writing becomes something we do every day, not just during workshops! Using Kelly McGonigal’s Neuroscience of Change strategies, we’ll create a plan for building and protecting our writing practice, establish new habits, and examine ways we self-sabotage… Each week, we’ll meet to address individual goals, learn new approaches and share achievements. Participants will emerge from this workshop with an improved daily practice and a plan for continued success!
6 Tuesdays, 6-9, Starting January 23 ($285) Register Now
Diana Gordon is the author of Fourth World (Adastra Press, 2010,) and Nightly, at the Institute of the Possible (Hedgerow Books, 2011) a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award and International Book Award. Gordon’s poems and short stories have been published widely in journals such as The Massachusetts Review, The Northwest Review, and Poetry Daily. She works as a professional editor. Find out more…
Writing the Personal Essay, with Sarah Buttenwieser:
 We all have powerful stories, and the personal essay is a great way to tell them. But what makes a personal essay work? It turns out there are a few guidelines that can really help you master the form. This daylong workshop is for anyone who wants to write personal essays and is looking for concrete tips on how to do it well. We’ll go over some key elements of successful personal narratives. We’ll read a few essays, brainstorm topics, give and receive feedback on our essay ideas—and then, with some scaffolding in place, we’ll write. You will leave this workshop with a rough draft of your own personal essay. If that sounds impossible, trust me—I know you can do it!
Saturday, Jan 27, 9:30 am– 4:30 pm ($150) Register Now
Sarah Buttenwieser’s essays appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Paste Magazine, Full Grown People and many others. A freelance journalist, she’s also at work on a middle grade novel. She’s taught blogging workshops at WIP. She got her MFA in fiction at Warren Wilson College.
GREEN FIRE WRITERS' WORKSHOPS
Winter/Spring 2018 Class Schedule
 Great Barrington—Green Fire Writers’ Workshops, founded by local authors Jennifer Browdy and Jana Laiz, offer a rich array of workshops for writers of every level.
All workshops will be held at the South Berkshire Friends Meeting House, 280 State Road in Great Barrington, for three-hour sessions on weekend afternoons or Thursday mornings. The full schedule is available at Greenfirewriters.com.
Green Fire Writers'- Women's memoir workshop
Women’s memoir workshop intensive led by Jennifer Browdy, limited to 6 memoirists with active projects. A memoir intensive circle led by Jennifer is now forming in Great Barrington, on four Sundays: February, 11, March 4, April 8, May 6, 2018, 1 – 4 p.m. Only four spaces left! Register here.
FEBRUARY POETRY WORKSHOPS
Learn more here: www.nohoarts.org/writers-workshops/
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WRITING RETREAT in Cumbrea, Scotland
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Join us June 8-15, 2018
Patricia Lee Lewis, Jacqueline Sheehan and Jane Mortifee will combine their energies for an unforgettable Creative Writing, Hatha Yoga and meditation retreat on the Isle of Cumbrae.
We will spend 8 days, 7 nights at The College of the Holy Spirit, set in 8 acres of woods and fields and five minutes from the broad seafront. Nearby Millport, with its beautiful curving bay and tiny harbor has from Victorian times been a favorite seaside resort, sheltered from sight of the mainland by its graceful hills and yet only a short ferry ride away. More here.
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Writers and Artists Retreat in Ireland!
 June 30-July 28
County Galway/Kinvara
Share a beautiful 5 bedroom home in the west of Ireland. Double and single rooms available. One week minimum. Shared kitchen, walking distance to town, 30 minutes from Shannon Airport. Master class in Hybrid Writing will be offered. July 16-29 is the Galway Arts Festival, an extravaganza of art, music, writing, and theater. Galway City is 30 minutes away. $400 for a double room per week (double bed) and $350 for a single room (twin bed) for a week. Literary gathering once a week—otherwise you are free to write or do your art. There are ferries to the Aran Islands from Galway and the Burren, Flaggy Shore, and the Cliffs of Moher are nearby. The small harbor town of Kinvara has traditional music and good restaurants. Shopping is about 15 minutes away though there are grocery shops in town and a wonderful Farmer’s Market once a week.
For information, contact Lisa C. Taylor
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Green Fire Writers
- Do you care passionately about our world?
- Do you want to use writing or other forms of creative expression to make a difference?
- If so, you should contribute to Fired Up!
Editors Jana Laiz and Jennifer Browdy seek writing in any genre, along with photography, short videos or podcasts that express positive, forward-thinking perspectives on where we are now as individuals and as a society and envision the better world we hope to create.
We accept submissions on a rolling basis and will publish a new online edition once a month.
Check out our submission guidelines HERE
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Consultation w/ Gail Thomas
Poet and teacher Gail Thomas is available for individual consultation on your poetry submissions, manuscripts and residency applications. With more than 40 years of publishing and teaching experience, Gail offers feedback that not only focuses on your writing goals, but also strengthens your craft. Contact her at gailthomaspoet@gmail.com or http://www.gailthomaspoet.com/
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Manuscript Review by D M Gordon
 Want your writing to be the best it can be? Aching to be published? Thinking of an MFA? Why not work with an individual editor first. I’m less expensive than a low-residency program, with more focused, extensive attention. I work with post-MFA grads towards publication, poetry, and prose, as well as writers first seeking to share their work. From query letters to self-publication, we can discuss your immediate goals and how to achieve them. A prize-winning poet and fiction writer, and an experienced, respectful editor in multiple genres, I’d love to talk with you.
Visit my website at www.dmgordoneditorial.com for more information, then write to me, Diana Gordon, at dmgordon@comcast.net. I look forward to hearing from you.
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Body-Mind Centering work with Beth Goren
 Gentle and effective hands-on sessions in the Body-Mind Centering work. Beth is a certified and registered teacher-practitioner with 40+ years of practice. She offers sliding scale rates for elders via her Hands-on Elders non-profit. Approach bones, muscles, nerves, glands, fluids, organs, voice/reading with integrity. Single session or series.
Learn more: www.bethgoren.com
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