Ridgefield Writers Conference a Success, Thanks to All

Ridgefield's historic fountain

Thanks to great coordinators, a wonderful workshop faculty and keynote speaker, industry-leading panelists and dedicated attendees, the inaugural Ridgefield Writers Conference on September 28 in historic Ridgefield, Connecticut, was a resounding success, with plans under consideration for a 2014 conference.

The Ridgefield Writers Conference, based on the Master of Fine Arts workshop format, surpassed its attendee goal, with participants coming from as far as North Carolina and northern New England. Due to the positive response to the event, a fiction and creative nonfiction workshop was added, as well as two literary agents to the morning and afternoon media and publishing panels.

The conference was kicked off by keynote speaker and award-winning author Dr. Michael White, founder and director of the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Fairfield University. The workshops featured fiction with acclaimed author Chris Belden, winner of Fairfield University’s 2013 book award, nonfiction with author and novelist Pete Nelson, whose novel I Thought You Were Dead has been optioned for film, creative nonfiction with award-winning novelist Rachel Basch, young adult fiction with multi-published author Steve Otfinoski and poetry with poetry professor and former Crazyhorse editor-in-chief Carol Ann Davis.

The media and publishing panels featured editors from The Newtowner, Alimentum and Connecticut Muse. Electronic and print publishers included BookTV Girl, Defying Gravity and Globe Pequot Press, and agents included Allen O’Shea, L. Perkins, Rita Rosenkranz and Talcott Notch.

he conference concluded with a wine and cheese reception sponsored by the Ridgefield Library for An Evening With the Authors, featuring Linda Merlino, Chris Belden, Nalini Jones and Pete Nelson. Books on the Common provided a venue for faculty-penned works on-site, and the Chamber of Commerce provided information on local venues.

For more information on the Ridgefield Writers Conference, created by Word for Words, LLC, with Ridgefield-based author Chris Belden and award-winning writer, editor and instructor Adele Annesi, please contact Adele Annesi at Word for Words, LLC, a.annesi@sbcglobal.net.

Mining Family History for Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

Mine your history for stories

Everyone has family of one sort or another, and most people can mine their family history for stories. But developing a story for fiction is different than you may think.

Going through personal or family history for story ideas doesn't have to mean an arduous search of archives. To select a unique idea worth developing, ask yourself these questions:

• What person in my family (including me) do I find most interesting, and why?
• What turning point occurred in this person's life that forever changed it?
• What pivotal incident led to the event — the one without which the turning point wouldn't have happened?
• What was the main outcome of the event?
• What was the most important consequence of the event, especially for that individual?

To fictionalize this story and elevate it to a more literary level, ask yourself these questions:

• What if the person was of a different race, ethnic background and/or gender?
• What if the turning point occurred at an earlier or a later stage of the person's life?
• What if the pivotal incident occurred in a different setting, or was a different incident altogether?
• What if the main the main outcome of the event was the opposite or vastly different from what happened?

 Making these changes will change the story and its ending, enabling it to become uniquely yours. The key to this approach is having some affinity for and/or experience in how you answer the questions. For example, if you change the setting, do you have some knowledge of the new locale? Truth is, after all, still stranger than fiction.

Tip: To add spice to your story, consider this adage from John Updike. There's the story you're afraid to tell others and the story you're afraid to tell yourself. That's the one to write. What aspect of your story are you afraid to tell?

Happy writing!

The Descendants: A Lesson in Cross-Genre Writing

Harmonic blending of genres

If you're looking for a great visual lesson on how to blend genres — particularly creative nonfiction and memoir — see The Descendants, a film based on the debut novel of the same name by Kaui Hart Hemmings and directed by Alexander Payne, starring George Clooney. Hemmings' Hawaiian upbringing and experience, along with her Sarah Lawrence education, underpin the story. The work blends several plotlines — the apparently unraveling personal life of main character Matt King, played by Clooney, and the impending sale of a vast chunk of legacy land owned by King's extensive haole family. What's particularly instructive about the movie is the seamless blending of the storylines, which presents a good approach to cross-genre work — assigning one plot line per genre.

If you see the film, let me know what you think.

Happy writing! 

Bonjour! Writing Happiness: Author Jamie Callan on the Joy of Discovery

Jamie Cat Callan,Paris

Award-winning author and instructor Jamie Cat Callan tells about French secrets to joie de vivre in her latest book Bonjour, Happiness! Elizabeth Bard, author of Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes said, "With warmth and sincerity, Callan shares that most precious of French life lessons — when to say 'enough.'" To research her topic, Jamie traveled throughout France, interviewing hundreds of women to find their secrets to living a well-balanced life. In this guest post, she describes the process.

AMA: What's your background?
JCC: I grew up in Connecticut and taught creative writing at Fairfield University, Wesleyan University and the Educational Center for the Arts. My grandmother was French-American, and inspired me to find the secrets to joie de vivre and true happiness.

AMA: Tell me about the new book.
JCC: Bonjour, Happiness! Five Ways to Find Your Joie de Vivre, American Style goes beyond relationship advice and offers a unique brand of whole-life happiness, sharing French women's secrets to finding joy.

Bonjour, Happiness!

AMA: What are some of the particulars you address in the book?
JCC: I describe my journey throughout France and the U.S., meeting with hundreds of women and talking about struggles with weight and body image, accepting middle age, and for me, coping with a new marriage — at age fifty — and rediscovering my French heritage.

AMA: Sounds like fun research. What did you learn during the process?
JCC: I embraced the beauty, mystery and magic of discovering a new culture, a spiritual journey told from the viewpoint of an innocent abroad, someone searching for inspiration, not just from the French, but particularly from French women. As a middle-aged woman living in youth-obsessed America, I looked for French answers to aging gracefully and finding joy in an imperfect body. I'm not so much interested in finding the fountain of youth as I am in finding the fountain of happiness. As Dove's "real beauty" ad campaign suggests, I learned to find the joy of loving my perfectly imperfect self.

AMA: How did the process of discovery play into the writing process, and life in general?
JCC: This is such an excellent question! French Women Don't Sleep Alone was so successful that by the time I began researching Bonjour I felt much clearer about what I wanted to do with this new book. Also, I had met so many great women on my American (as well as French women) book tour, and a lot of their questions and concerns went into the writing of Bonjour. My language skills had improved along the way, so I was able to connect with and interview a lot more women. The more I got to know and become friends with French women, the more I understood my grandmother and her sense of joie de vivre. It was as if these women were bringing her back to me. I would say this was especially true of my French tutor, Madame M. who is very beautiful, very elegant and in some ways a surrogate grandmere to me.

AMA: What an amazing journey. What was the writing process like?
JCC: Here's something that might surprise your readers. The book proposal for Bonjour, Happiness! was originally for a memoir. I wanted to write about my childhood, my grandmother, my experiences in France. However, my very wise editor at Kensington said she wanted another advice book similar to French Women Don't Sleep Alone, but that this new book could use narrative as well as prescriptive. In the end, I wrote a kind of amalgam of memoir and self-help. I blended the genres into something new—I'm not sure what to call it. Maybe literary self-help? Whatever it is, I'm happy with the outcome and readers are responding positively.

For more information on Jamie's amazing writing journey, visit Bonjour, Happiness! Or see her at Jamie Cat Callan. The book is available on Amazon at Bonjour, Happiness! Five Ways to Find Your Joie de Vivre, American Style.

Invitation to Wonder, Too: A Writer's Journey

Award-winning newspaper columnist and Center for Creative Writing founder Elizabeth Ayres has authored Invitation to Wonder: A Journey through the Seasons. She describes what prompted the book, and the emotional healing writing can bring. The winning comment on her posts will receive an autographed copy of Elizabeth's Invitation to Wonder.

AA: How would you categorize "the journey" noted in the subtitle?

Elizabeth at the Patuxent RiverWriting Retreat-Workshop

EA: My background is poetry. When I moved back to southern Maryland, every wave, every leaf, every bird, everything spoke to me, everything put words in my head, but I wanted to give voice to this experience in such a way that it would be accessible to a general audience, which tends to be intimidated by verse space. I decided to write prose, and I proposed a monthly column of lyric reflections to a regional newspaper.

So there I was, writing about Nature each month, trying to express the amazing aliveness of the world around me, but also conscious of my readers: What would make the reflection most relevant, most meaningful to them? In "Butterfly Q and A," for instance, I started out writing about honeysuckle — that was what was calling to me at the time. Honeysuckle was in bloom, I was transfixed by the smell — but I also knew the column would appear in July, so I related it to Independence Day, an experience common to all my readers, so a connection between nectar and freedom emerged. Or with "Vigil." I'd been wanting to write about the stars for a while. As Columbus Day approached I thought, well, Columbus would have used the stars to navigate, so that's how I can link the two things together and make the reflection most meaningful to my readers. After four years, I had cycled through the seasons four times, addressing every major and minor event in the American experience: from Martin Luther King Day through Memorial Day and Labor Day, from Easter through Thanksgiving and Christmas, from Groundhog Day through Mother's Day and Halloween.

The seasonal progression became all the more apparent when I decided to record selections from the book as an MP3 audio download. I realized that Invitation to Wonder contained not one but five distinct themes, each of which can be experienced as we travel through the seasons. So this became A Journey through the Seasons, Celebrating the Journey, A Journey into the Cosmos, A Journey into Chesapeake Country and A Journey into Divine Presence. Then, when I decided to create a study guide for each audio; the series just naturally demanded to be called The Companion on the Journey Listening Guides. I give these away free with the audios. I had been resistant to the word "journey" at first — it's so overdone! But it seems to have been an inspired choice after all.

For an autographed copy of Elizabeth's Invitation to Wonder, post the best comment on the writing life.

Elizabeth Ayres is also the creator of Writing the Wave, Know the Way and her Center for Creative Writing is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Visit her at Invitation to Wonder.