Upcoming WordPlay

WRITE YOURSELF

(Writing Tools & Strategies; Creating New Writing)

Reap writing's benefits -- physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Give yourself the gift of exploring how creative writing (journaling, memoir, poetry, fiction) can enrich your life, and what your writing can provide for others. You'll learn a number of fun, easy approaches to the writing process. Ideal for beginners and anyone interested in renewing and expanding their writing and their relationship to self, others, and the world.This workshop is offered FREE!

WHERE: Scaleybark Regional Library, 101 Scaleybark Road, Charlotte, NC 28209,
(704) 416-6400
WHEN: Saturday, May 24, 2 to 4 pm
TO REGISTER: Register Online Here

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

(Fulfilling Writing Dreams & Goals; Creating New Writing; Revising & Polishing Your Writing)

This class is designed to fulfill your writing dreams and projects. You'll set goals and support structures and watch your writing flow! You'll also get feedback on your work (any genre) and learn revision tools. Jumpstart your pen and receive the knowledge and inspiration you need to write, whatever your preferred genre. Each week, writing prompts will generate material for new writing or further a piece in process. Through examples of accomplished writers, you'll learn techniques to aid you right where you are in the process. $229 for 7 classes.

WHERE: Covenant Presbyterian Recreation Center, 1000 East Morehead Street, 28204

TO REGISTER: Click here to register online. Or click here for a printable, mail-in form.

Note: If you're interested in an Under Construction class that meets on Wednesday mornings in South Charlotte, please email Maureen here or call 704-494-9961. There are just a few spots left!

SUMMER WRITING RETREAT

(Writing - and More - as Renewal; Creating New Writing)

Renew and delight yourself. The Summer Writing Retreat is an opportunity to create new pieces of writing and/or new possibilities for our lives. Enjoy various seasonal prompts; they have not failed to elicit beautiful material that can be shaped into essays, poems, stories, or articles. After a communal lunch, you'll have private time which can be used to collage, work with a piece of writing from the morning, or play with a number of other writing prompts and methods. You'll take home new ideas, new drafts, and new possibilities. $97 includes lunch and supplies.

WHERE: South Charlotte area. Details will be provided upon registration.
WHEN: Saturday, July 19, 2014, 10 am - 5 pm

TO REGISTER ONLINE, CLICK HERE. Or click here for a printable, mail-in form.

WordPlay Success Story

"Maureen's remarkable writing and creativity classes have transformed me from somebody who 'always wanted to be a writer' into somebody who is one."

Meet Caroline Castle Hicks

A former high school English and Humanities teacher, Caroline Castle Hicks, author of Such Stuff As Stars Are Made Of: Thoughts on Savoring the Wonders in Everyday Life, is an award-winning freelance writer and poet. Her essays and poems have appeared in numerous publications, including two editions of the popular Chicken Soup for the Soul series as well as Open My Eyes, Open My Soul, an anthology published in commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 75th birthday. She has also been a regular public radio commentator on Charlotte, North Carolina's NPR affiliate, WFAE 90.7 FM. 

WHAT CAROLINE SAYS ABOUT WordPlay

In the dedication of my first book, from which the essay below is taken, I wrote that Maureen's "remarkable writing and creativity classes have transformed me from somebody who 'always wanted to be a writer' into somebody who is one." Maureen sometimes refers to herself as a "creative midwife," and over the course of our 19-year friendship, she has indeed labored with me, nudging, encouraging and breathing my writing dreams into being. As I'm sure many of her other students could attest, she is often an incubator as well, keeping our dreams warm until we come to believe in them as much as she does. Her nurturing spirit and uncanny teaching skill make Wordplay a powerful wellspring for all of us who long to bring our creativity to life.

  It Goes Right Over Our Heads

by

Caroline Castle Hicks

Becoming an astronaut was not my destiny. I'm too claustrophobic, for starters, and advanced math was never my thing. But that didn't stop me from developing a lifelong fascination with all things space-related. I'm one of those people who keeps track of the phases of the moon, the seasonal positions of Mars and Venus, and the likelihood of a meteor shower. It sounds paradoxical, I know, but for me, there's something comforting about the unfathomability of it all.

Naturally, it makes my day whenever the local paper announces that the International Space Station will be passing through our celestial neighborhood. By now, my husband and kids are used to seeing a sticky note appear on the kitchen cabinet every few weeks reminding me of the exact time and coordinates of the next fly-over. Shaking their heads, they smile indulgently as I bundle up before dawn or leave dinner on the stove in order to keep my regular five-minute rendezvous at the end of our driveway. Sometimes, if it's not too early or too cold-or if the TV isn't too mesmerizing-they join me, and I keep hoping my cosmic cheerleading will rub off on them.

We tend to get ourselves so revved up over the stuff that's shoved in our faces every day-the latest sports statistics, the latest American Idol auditions, the latest antics of Brad and Angelina. For me, those few moments spent in the dark, waiting for a fast-moving pinpoint of light to climb out of the horizon, provide a wake-up call, a welcome reminder of what's really amazing.

Every once in a while, it just feels good to marvel, to stand in awe, not only of the universe, but of the collective earthly intelligence that vaulted a house-sized metal contraption into orbit and enables human beings to live and work on it for six months at a time. There are people up there, I think every time I see it, and I get goose bumps still. What do they see, I wonder, as they streak across the night sky, sometimes threading right through the notches in Orion's belt. The whole east coast of North America, at least, its cities mapped out in lights, and all of it bumped up against the vast darkness of the Atlantic.

A Saudi Arabian astronaut on the space shuttle once said that "on the first day, we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day, we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth." The rest of us will never have that stunning perspective of our planet, but I think it would do us all a lot of good to step outside in the deepening twilight every now and then and watch for the ones who do. After all, watching them watching us can't help but make our own world view a little bigger.

~ Caroline Castle Hicks in Such Stuff As Stars Are Made Of:
                        Thoughts on Savoring the Wonders in Everyday Life                                                                                                                                                                        

MAUREEN RYAN GRIFFIN, an award-winning poetry and nonfiction writer, is the author of Spinning Words into Gold, a Hands-On Guide to the Craft of Writing, a grief workbook entitled I Will Never Forget You, and two collections of poetry, This Scatter of Blossoms and When the Leaves Are in the Water. She believes, as author Julia Cameron says, "We are meant to midwife dreams for one another."

Maureen also believes that serious "word work" requires serious WordPlay, as play is how we humans best learn -- and perform. What she loves best is witnessing all the other dreams that come true for her clients along the way. Language, when used with intentionality and focus, is, after all, serious fuel for joy. Here's to yours!