My big writing adventure in January was Tennessee Mountain Writers’ January Jumpstart on January 18-19, in Oak Ridge, TN. We had two workshop speakers, Lisa Coffey for Poetry and Robert Gipe for Fiction. I was in Robert Gipe’s workshop. As always, Robert was phenomenal! He gave us several writing prompts, including one with candy hearts (the ones we all used to give/get for Valentine’s Day when we were kids), where he had us imagine our own regional expressions for candy hearts, which was a lot of fun to do. Hearing what our classmates came up with, too, was great. I especially liked the ones that were in the negative – not everyone wants a Valentine, right?!? My favorite exercise was the prompt where Gipe posed the question, “Are you making your characters miserable enough,” and used this Mark Powell quote to motivate us: “Put your characters in a high limb of a tree, then set it on fire.”
Savannah Sipple’s writing classes have continued, and are, as always, brilliant. On February 1, she had a great prompt: Pick a café or a beauty shop and go with the following statement – “You didn’t hear it from me.” THAT has a world of potential, especially when you’re writing about small towns like I have been for the past eighteen months!
On February 7, I got to attend the first day of the Mildred Haun Conference. Robert Gipe led the first session I went to. My favorite prompt that day was one where we wrote about why we write. It was interesting to read my reaction to that question. There was another great one, too, where we were to write a piece where an inanimate object becomes the narrator of the piece. I didn’t finish that one, but I have a pretty cool idea for it.
I had to miss Connie Green’s second Poetry chapbook class the next day because my traveling companion got sick on Friday night and I didn’t want to carry anything in to the other people in the class. Turns out it was a smart move because I ended up with norovirus the next day. The next time we meet, the rough draft of our chapbook is due, though, so I’ve got a lot of work to do in the next three months. I hated missing that meeting because I feel like I missed a major step in the process… Reading handouts isn’t the same as soaking up the awesomeness that IS Connie Green in a teaching environment.
I’ve also been really busy trying to get several submissions ready in February. My last one to do is my manuscript for Hindman. I’m applying in Poetry this year, which is rolling the dice, for sure, because poetry is so competitive to get into there. If I don’t get in, then I’ll just know it wasn’t meant to be. I’ll be sad, yes, but I’ve never applied in Poetry and would love to work with Denton Loving in Poetry there this summer. We’ll see what happens… At any rate, I will be going to Table Rock in late August and working with Jill McCorkle on Short Story there. It promises to be a full and exciting summer, either way, with other writing endeavors in the works, too.
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