Volume V, Issue 15 April 11, 2016 Dear ,
I hope you are feeling lucky right now, as you read this. We all have days when it feels
that everything's going our way—and days when it feels like nothing is.
But this week, CPCC is hosting Sensoria, its arts festival, and I can't help but feel lucky as I think about all the fun I've had at past festivals, when I've had the chance to do amazing things like introduce Anne Lamott, and have a drink
with Dana Gioia and friends, and drive Mary Oliver to the airport, and meet one of my poetry idols, Linda Pastan, with whom I'm pictured here. Do check out the full schedule of all the participating writers and artists, musicians, and
more.
I'm especially excited to see Amy Bloom, about whose book Lucky Us The Washington Post wrote, “Bighearted, rambunctious . . . a bustling tale of American reinvention . . . If America has a Victor Hugo, it is Amy
Bloom, whose picaresque novels roam the world, plumb the human heart and send characters into wild roulettes of kismet and calamity.”
You have two chances to see this New York Times bestselling fiction writer in person:
Wednesday, April 13th at
10:30 a.m. – 11:20 a.m.
and/or
8 p.m. – 9 p.m. at
Dale F. Halton Theater
Bloom's morning presentation will contemplate “A Good & Happy Life—and Why It’s
Hard to Live One.” In the evening, she will read from and discuss her literary work, including her most recent novel, Lucky Us. Read about both presentations here.
And you can check out all that CPCC’s Sensoria arts festival has to offer here.
Whether or not you can make it, I wish you all the luck in the world—in and out of your writing.
Upcoming WordPlay
POETRY ROCKS!
(Learning the Ins and Outs of Poetry; Strengthening Your Writing Skills; Adding a New Layer of Literary Beauty to Your Life)
You’ll receive a daily “Poetry Creation Tool” in written and audio form (23 in all!) beginning on the day you register, AND, at the end of the program, an e-book that contains all your Poetry Rocks tools and
resources.
Would you like your writing—prose and/or poetry—to be more graceful, powerful, beautiful? Do you sometimes find poetry confusing or intimidating and wish you could “crack the code”? Or do you enjoy writing and reading poems, but want a more thorough understanding of what makes a poem good? Then this poetry extravaganza is for you.
Expect a good time exploring what makes a poem a poem, gaining the knowledge you need to confidently create and revise poetry, and strengthening your writing skills in all genres.
It would be a joy and an honor to share what rocks about poetry with you!
HERE’S WHAT YOU GET: - 23 poetry creation tools, delivered one per day (Monday through Friday) to your inbox—in honor of National Poetry month. Use them as you get them, use them when you can, use them over and over to create poems. Each tool zeroes in on one aspect of poetry and provides an innovative method to approach writing a poem.
Many of them are great for creating prose, too. The tools include:
* a purpose, so you’re clear what you will learn
* background information when helpful
* “how-to” directions to create a poem
* an example that illustrates the poetry tool in action
* a short reflection to solidify the concepts covered
* “Hone Your Craft” suggestions for further exploration
* a short reflection to solidify the concepts covered - A PDF document of each tool that you can
print or save on your computer
- An audio recording of each tool, so you can learn by listening and/or reading
- Instruction on the role of audience, reading like a writer, and the process of revision, including a handy Revision Checkpoint Chart — this information
can be applied to strengthen your prose as well as poetry
- Additional poetry resources
- An e-book that contains the information and resources covered, as well as your 23 poetry creation tools for ongoing use
WHERE: From the comfort of your own home WHEN: Any time you want! And once you receive all 23 tools, they’re yours to keep, which means that you can keep using them for years to come. COST: $45
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"WRITING OURSELVES
WHOLE"
Writing Workshop
Come and explore the benefits writing can provide—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. In this workshop, you will learn and practice simple yet profound ways to use words to heal, to transform, and to grow, as well as to reflect on the way God is working in your life. These methods can also be used to
create stories, poems, and/or essays. Whatever form your writing takes, you will leave this retreat with a new set of skills for writing and growing. Our time together will be ideal for beginners as well as for seasoned writers as we explore the renewal and deepening of our relationship with God, self, others, and the world.
WHERE: Olmsted Manor Retreat Center. 17 E. Main Street, Ludlow, PA 16333.
WHEN: Saturday evening, May 14 until Monday afternoon, May 16, 2016
COST: $252 (includes tuition, room and board)
TO REGISTER: To register online, please visit the Olmsted Manor
Retreat Center website here.
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WRITE LIKE A GENIUS
(Expanding Our
Creativity; Learning New Tools for Our Writing and Our Lives; Creating New Writing)
Discover your own genius as you learn to apply seven fascinating approaches of Leonardo da Vinci to your writing. These techniques enliven non-fiction, poetry and fiction. Expect fun, inspiration and writing galore in your preferred genre, with opportunities to share your work.
$630 for one
week-long session (lodging and meals are additional – options can be found on the Folk School website) WHERE: John Campbell Folk School, 1 Folk School Road, Brasstown, NC 28902
WHEN: Sunday, August 7
– Saturday August 13, 2016.
TO REGISTER: To register, please click this John Campbell Folk School link to register directly from them.
More WordPlay opportunities here. Photo courtesy of http://sensoria.cpcc.edu/event/511/
Displaying an unparalleled beauty of language, depth of psychological exploration, and narrative authority, Amy Bloom is the NYT best-selling author of three novels, Lucky Us, Away, and Love Invents Us, and three collections of short
stories, Where the God Of Love Hangs Out, Come to Me, and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. Having written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, and Salon, she is the Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University.
Featured
Writing
an excerpt from
Lucky Us
by
Amy Bloom
My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.
She tapped my nose with her grapefruit spoon. “It’s like this,” she said. “Your father loves us more, but he’s got another family, a wife, and a girl a little older than you. Her family had all the money. Wipe your face.”
There was no one like my mother, for straight
talk. She washed my neck and ears until they shone. We helped each other dress: her lilac dress, with the underarm zipper, my pink one with the tricky buttons. My mother did my braids so tight, my eyes pulled up. She took her violet cloche and her best gloves and she ran across the road to borrow Mr. Portman’s car. I was glad to be going and I thought I could get to be glad about having a sister. I wasn’t sorry my father’s other wife was dead.
•••
We’d waited for him for weeks. My mother sat by the window in the morning and smoked through supper every night. When she came home from work at Hobson’s, she was in a bad mood, even after I rubbed her feet. I hung around the house all July, playing with Mr. Portman’s poodle, waiting for my father to
drive up. When he came, he usually came by two o’clock, in case there was a Fireside Chat that day. We listened to all the Fireside Chats together. We loved President Roosevelt. On Sundays, when my father came, he brought a pack of Lucky Strikes for my mother and a Hershey bar for me. After supper, my mother sat in my father’s lap and I sat right on his slippers and if there was a Fireside Chat, my father did his FDR imitation. Good evening, friends, he said, and he stuck a straw in his mouth
like a cigarette holder. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. He bowed to my mother and said, Eleanor, my dear, how ’bout a waltz? They danced to the radio for a while and then it was my bedtime. My mother put a few bobby pins in my hair for curls and my father carried me to bed, singing, “I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate.” Then he tucked me in and shimmied out the door. Monday mornings, he was gone and I waited until Thursday, and sometimes, until next
Sunday.
My mother parked the car and redid her lipstick. My father’s house was two stories of red stone and tall windows, with fringed lace curtains behind and wide brown steps stacked like boxes in front of the shining wood door. Your father does like to have things nice, while he’s away, she said. It sure is nice,
I said. We ought to live here....
My mother knocked and my father answered the door in the blue vest he wore at our house during the president’s speeches. My father hugged me and my parents whispered to each other while I stood there, trying to see more of the parlor, which was as big as our whole apartment and
filled with flowers. (Maybe my father said, What the hell are you doing here? Maybe my mother cursed him for staying away, but I doubt it. My father had played the gentleman his whole life and my mother must have said to me a hundred times that men needed to be handled right and a woman who couldn’t handle her man had only herself to blame. “When I say men are dogs,” she’d say, “I’m not being insulting. I like dogs.”) Behind my father, I saw a tall girl.
“My daughter Iris,” my father said. I could hear my mother breathe in.
“Iris,” he said, “this is my friend Mrs. Logan and her daughter, her lovely daughter,
Eva.”
I knew, standing in their foyer, that this girl had a ton of things I didn’t have. Flowers in crystal vases the size of buckets. Pretty, light-brown curls. My father’s hand on her shoulder. She wore a baby-blue sweater and a white blouse with a bluebird pin on the collar. I think she wore stockings. Iris was sixteen and she looked like a grown woman to me. She looked like a movie star. My father
pushed us to the stairs and told Iris to entertain me in her room while he and my mother had a chat....
Iris told me that the whole college (I didn’t know my father taught at a college; if you had asked me, I would have said that he read books for a living) came to the chapel to grieve for her mother, to offer
sympathy to her and her father. She said that all of their family friends were there, which was her way of telling me that my mother could not really be a friend of her father’s.
We heard the voices downstairs and then a door shutting and then the piano, playing “My Angel Put the Devil in Me.” I didn’t know my
father played the piano. Iris and I stood at her bedroom door, leaning into the hall. We heard the toilet flush, which was embarrassing but reassuring and then my father started playing the “Moonlight Sonata” and then we heard a car’s engine. Iris and I ran downstairs. My mother’d left the front door open and just slipped into Mr. Portman’s car. She’d set a brown tweed suitcase on the front porch. I stood on the porch holding the suitcase, looking at the road. My father sat down in the rocker
and pulled me onto his lap, which he’d stopped doing last year. He asked me if I thought my mother was coming back and I asked him, Do you think my mother is coming back? My father asked me if I had any other family on my mother’s side, and I lay my head on his shoulder. I’d seen my father most Sundays and some Thursdays since I was a baby, and the whole rest of my family was my mother. I was friendly with Mr. Portman and his poodle and all of my teachers had taken an interest in me, and that
was the sum of what you could call my family.
Iris opened the screen door and looked at me the way a cat looks at a dog.
You can read about Lucky Us here. And you can buy a copy at one of Amy Bloom's presentations at Sensoria!
WordPlay Now! Writing
Prompt This is WordPlay—so why not revel in the power and
potential of one good word after another? This week, it's "lucky."
PROMPT: Write about being lucky—or being unlucky. 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! |
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