Join us May 12th at Unitarian Universalist Church In Asheville [ see directions ] along with our special guest Kathryn Stripling Byer, North Carolina Poet Laureate ncarts.org
$90 for the day (includes lunch)

The workshop schedule will run from 9:00am until 5:00pm
and will include lunch catered by The Colorful Palate.

TO REGISTER STEP 1: CALL US AT 689-2988 with your credit card or send a check to WNC WOMAN PO Box 1332 Mars Hill NC 28754, or register with PayPal. STEP 2: EMAIL YOUR SELECTION FOR EACH OF THE BREAKOUTS TO editors@wnc-woman.com

 

PHOTO BY MAX POPPERS	KEYNOTE: About Peggy Tabor Millin Peggy founded ClarityWorks in 1996 to explore how the writing process nurtures the inner life and transforms the outer world of the writer. "As the writing groups evolved, I observed that no matter what women wrote about, whether it was truth or fiction, the writing transformed their lives. Our stories—the narrative of how we view our daily lives—have the ability to empower, heal, educate, and enlighten at deeper and deeper levels. I find that my lifetime of training and experience in neuropsychology, Eastern and Western religions, facilitation and training of adults, and working with Native Americans serves me well as a foundation for my teaching and writing. I have published training manuals, magazine articles, short stories, and the nonfiction book, Mary's Way, and edited for individuals and publishers. Since adolescence, my personal writing provided the grounding for my inner exploration while writing nonfiction and fiction became my mode of creative self-expression." [ clarityworksonline.com; 828.298.3863 ]
Fearless Writing: A Woman's Way to Words
PHOTO BY CHRIS ENGLISH, UNCG	Kay Stripling Byer NC POET LAUREATE Kathryn Stripling Byer grew up in southwest Georgia, graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, and earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she studied with Allen Tate, Fred Chappell, and Robert Watson. Her books of poetry include Catching Light (Louisiana State University Press, 2002); Black Shawl (1998); Wildwood Flower (1992), which was the 1992 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest (1986), which was published in the Associated Writing Programs award series. Byer's poems have appeared in Arts Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Georgia Review, Hudson Review, Iowa Review, Nimrod, Poetry, and Southern Review, as well as numerous anthologies. Her essays have appeared in Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers (edited by Joyce Dyer; University Press of Kentucky, 1998), Dream Garden: The Poetic Vision of Fred Chappell (edited by Patrick Bizzaro; Louisiana State University Press, 1997), The Boston Globe, and Shenandoah. Kathryn Stripling Byer has received writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is poet-in-residence at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. You can sign up for a private 15-minute review of your poetry with Kay in breakout sessions one and two. [ ncarts.org/poet_laureate.cfm ]
Poetry Workshop: Your Wild & Precious Life Using Mary Oliver's question, "What will you do with your one wild and precious life?" we will write our way into the wild domain of memory, place, and natural history.  By natural, I do not mean the standard biological definition, but the history that a natural landscape inscribes upon us, its "text" that shows us how to live, especially in times when our landscapes, both inner and outer, are threatened.  Our poems and stories point the way to wholeness.  As the first Americans tried to tell us, "Without your own story, you lose your way."  Poetry can help us find our own story, sing it forth, and move on into richer and more attentive lives.  Participants will write, share their work, and talk about what it is calling out to them to heed, to preserve, to celebrate. (2 hours)
PHOTO BY RON MORECRAFT	About Lavina Plonka Lavinia Plonka has been writing since she could hold a pencil.  For 25 years she kept her mouth shut, performing as a mime and writing pieces that bypassed words.  After an epiphany in 1994, words have been pouring in multiple streams - Lavinia has published two books both by Tarcher/Penguin: What Are You Afraid Of? A Body/Mind Guide to  Courageous Living and Walking Your Talk: Changing Your Life Through  the Magic of Body Language.  Her first book has been translated into five languages and both books are One Spirit Book Club selections.   Lavinia is editor of SenseAbility, the Feldenkrais Method Quarterly Newsletter.  She has written for such varied publications as Science of Mind Magazine and Jain Spiriit.  Lavinia is a monthly columnist for WNC Woman.  She teaches workshops for personal development and creativity around the world and is director of the Asheville Movement Center.  She tries to spend time each morning on continuing the Great American Novel. [ ashevillemovementcenter.com ]
Opening the Trunk Many of us remember a trunk up in the attic filled with mysteries that fired the imagination.  Our own trunks contain much more: four chakras, our vital organs, and according to ancient teachings, our emotional center.  In a safe, nurturing environment, this mind/body workshop combines movement, talk and of course writing to write from the core, speak your will and open your heart to your creative potential. All levels of experience, all genres are welcome. (2 hours) Finding Humor in All the Wrong Places Google “Laughter is the best medicine” and you will find a plethora of studies that actually confirm it with all the scientific bells and whistles.  You’ll also find laughing clubs, and even a certified Laughter Yoga teacher. Shoot, you should just watch me do yoga, you’ll laugh your ass off. Which means I guess that laughter will also help you lose weight.  In a world gone mad, it’s easy to get down in the dumps.  Which is why we need comedy more than ever.  Spend an hour (half hour?) discovering the humor in some of your darkest attitudes.  Unleash the wise fool that’s screaming for an endorphin hit. (Yes, laughter produces endorphins – which means you CAN lose weight!) Special Bonus: Learn the many ways you can fall on your face and act as if you planned it.
PHOTO BY MAX POPPERS	About Jessie Jones After twenty-two years as a character actress, Jessie Jones’, career was derailed by the most terrifying of all demons Hollywood can imagine, middle age.  Rather than accept banishment into the netherworld inhabited by the “invisible” masses over the age of thirty-four, Jessie teamed with her writing partners, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten and established an exciting career for themselves as playwrights.  Recently hailed as “dynamic, new comedic voices of the American South,” Jessie, Nicholas and Jamie have co-authored the new Southern theatrical comedies “Dearly Beloved,” “Christmas Belles,” “Southern Hospitality” and “The Dixie Swim Club.”  Within eight months of the publication of “Dearly Beloved,” (Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 2005) productions of the show were contracted by sixty-one theatres across the U.S. and Canada.  “Christmas Belles” will be published this Spring (Dramatists Play Service, Inc.) and later this year, the trio will also receive world premieres of two new plays.     In addition, Jessie has had short stories published in literary journals (Rosebud, Writing for Our Lives, Artisan), she’s written for television sitcoms (WB, Disney), film (Fox Searchlight, “Kingdom Come,” feature film adaptation of “Dearly Departed”) and co-authored the perennial theatre favorite, “Dearly Departed” (Dramatists Play Service, Inc. 1992.)   [ joneshopewooten.com ]
Belle South - Writing strong, Southern female characters for stage.
PHOTO BY MAX POPPERS	About Vicki Lane Vicki Lane is the author of the Elizabeth Goodweather mysteries from BantamDell. The first two books of the series, Signs in the Blood and Art's Blood, will be followed by Old Wounds in 2007 and In a Dark Season in 2008.  Vicki draws her inspiration from the past and present of rural North Carolina where she and her family have tended a mountainside farm since 1975. “Change is coming to the mountains (my family is part of it) and many of the old ways are disappearing.  The ubiquitous television threatens to substitute Valley Girl or hip-hop patois for the indigenous twang.  Hand-hewn log houses give way to double-wides and ranch houses (or factory-made log home kits, purchased by Florida people.)  Tractors have replaced mules; biscuits in a can have replaced homemade.  A Florida person (me) is hired by the local community college to teach quilting.  Most of my students are local women.  ‘Mamaw always quilted but I never got interested till she was gone.’ I'm not deploring change; might as well deplore a river as it grinds out deeper channels in one place, silts up in another.   I know that change is inevitable and brings with it both good and bad.  But I want to capture something of the gift that the past thirty years in these mountains have given me.  The images, the stories, the particular turn of a phrase:  (‘I wouldn't trust that man in my meathouse with a muzzle!’  Clifford said of Richard Nixon, back in 1974.) So I write about the mountains and their people, both natives and newcomers.  ‘Respect must be paid,’ as Willy Loman's wife says in ‘Death of a Salesman.’  I want to remember and respect the stories and the ways that are fading fast, as well as to celebrate the mountains as they are today.” [ vickilanemysteries.com ]
BLOOMING IN A DIFFERENT FIELD: Finding Your (Fictional) Voice "Twenty-five years as a back-to-the-land farmwife and sometime soccer mom -- what the hell do I think I'm doing suddenly trying to write a novel?"  Those were my thoughts, back in the fall of 2000 after the first meeting of a writing class at the Madison campus of AB Tech. One writing class (6 two-hour meetings), one snarky comment from the instructor, a real Well, oh yeah? We'll see about that! attitude, and today I have an agent, a mystery series from BantamDell, and a foot in a totally new world. If you're interested in writing fiction and following the traditional path to publication, let me share my story and answer your questions. RUMPELSTILTSKIN'S WORKSHOP:  Spinning Straw into Gold Maybe you're an old hand at journaling but would like to try your hand at fiction -- a short story or a novel.  I'll lead a two hour workshop (for anyone who wants to tell a lively story) on turning everyday experience and observation into fiction.  Working from picture-prompts, you'll write brief scenes (the building blocks of longer fiction), then read and discuss them in the group. The focus will be on working with character, setting, and dialogue. Kick-start your creativity and have fun as you discover that inspiration is everywhere.
PHOTO BY MAX POPPERS	About Jonna Rae Bartges Jonna Rae's parents created that unusual moniker for her because "it would be a great pen name".  Their intuition was write on -- Jonna Rae's been composing since she could hold a crayon.  A poem she wrote when she was 10 for Jacquie Kennedy after JFK's assassination is on display at the Kennedy Museum.  She went to college on a journalism scholarship, and has won international awards for her writing skills.  She has written for Disneyland, Sea World, Medieval Times, LEGOLAND, The Optimum Health Institute, Psychic Dimensions, Valley Monthly, The Light Connection, WNC Woman and Insights (the national Hospice magazine).  She is working on her second collaboration with a naturapathic doctor, and anticipates publishing by the end of summer. [ bartges.com ]
Author!  Author! (I Did it Myyyyyyy Way!) So you have a great idea for a book, maybe even a rough draft, and you're wondering what that important next step is?  Author Jonna Rae Bartges will help you figure out the write thing to do with her  "Top Ten Things You Must Know About Self-Publishing."  The costs, the timelines, the editing and marketing options, the royalties -- she's got what works, the quirks, and the perks of doing the job yourself.  She edited a book for an animal communicator who decided to self-publish, and the woman ended up with a basement full of boxes for several years.  Jonna Rae opted for an Internet publish-on-demand solution for the first of a series of books she co-wrote with a naturapathic doctor, and collects monthly royalty checks.  Find out which method is best for you.  Handouts include author's guidelines from several e-publishers.
PHOTO BY MAX POPPERS	About Joan Medlicott Joan came to writing at age 60 with a non-fiction book Celibate Wives, and went on to write strictly fiction. Without any background in writing, she literally started from scratch. She will tell you that she was the "absolute worst" in her initial writers groups, but she took criticism well went on to take classes, read copiously, and learn, learn, learn.  "It's amazing what you can do, what you can learn, how you can grow when you find a passion," she says. To date Joan has produced an impressive body of work: eight Ladies of Covington novels; one non-ladies novel, The Three Mrs. Parkers; and three self-published Virgin Islands books. She has two completed novels in the pipeline with Pocket Books and is working on two other novels. [ joanmedlicott.com ]
Inspiration to Publication and Beyond "Why do we write? What drives us to the long and solitary process of creation? And when the manuscript is finished, how do we find an agent? You are delighted when an agent says "Yes!" and jubilant when a publisher says "Yes!" and now you're published. How then do we help the publisher market our book? We'll talk about how best bellers are made and consider the option of self-publishing, which appeals to many authors these days. Bring your questions and I'll do my best to answer them!
PHOTO BY MAX POPPERS	About Britt Kaufmann Britt Kaufmann grew up in Northern Indiana, where she taught high school English for five years.  All that rapidly ended when she began popping out kids (3 in just over two years - none of whom are yet school-aged) and subsequently, she has devoted the vast majority of her time to being a stay@home mom.  A poem is about all the longer she can think and therefore, that's what she writes.   After moving to WNC nearly four years ago, Britt found her voice through the book The Artist's Way (by Julia Cameron) and a local women's open-mic reading called Eve's Night Out held at Blue Moon Books in Spruce Pine.  She now hosts that monthly reading and is on the steering committee for the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival (cmlitfest.org) held each September in Burnsville. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Mothering Magazine, Main Street Rag, WNC Woman, SouthLit.com, Literary Mama, The Mennonite, Elegant Thorn Review, The Pedestal, and she is to be included in the 2007 edition of Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets. [ brittkaufmann.com ]
Getting up the Gumption:  So you've written some poems/pieces and you'd really like to get them published, but now what?  This session deals with how to begin submitting to literary journals and magazines .  I will relay what helped me to get started and share how to bolster yourself for rejection, be smart about where you send your stuff, and how to revise and edit your work.  In this session I will also address some of those things about writing for WNC Woman that I have learned over the last few years.
Reading Your Work :  Whether you are a fledgling scribbler or a published author, the ability to read your work out loud is an important part of the writer's total package.  It is a skill that can garner you recognition and a place in the writing community before you even have big publications under your belt.  Further, once you do have a book, your ability to read well from it becomes a key to sales.   This session will look at what makes for a good reading, keys to reading well, and time to practice.  Bring a short (benign) poem or a one-page section of prose you have written for a workshop exercise. (2 hours)