"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,

but by making the darkness conscious."  -- Carl Jung

      A "Shadow" is a part of our self that we hide, repress or deny.  Robert Bly says we were each born into a "360-degree personality."  As infants we expressed the full circle of our human nature, without editing or censoring.   As we grew up, however, we learned that certain slices of our 360-degree pie were unacceptable to the people around us.  So, we threw those slices over our shoulder into a black bag, which we've dragged behind us ever since.
     All writers are blocked to some degree -- usually because of ideas about what NOT to write.  We don't allow ourselves free rein to express all that is carried by our bodies, our minds, and our hearts.
     Your shadows are a gold mine of creative energy.  If you stuff things in your black bag while you write, your writing won't have enough energy for it to live the way you want it to.                                                                                                             
      Using prompts and exercises, this workshop will help you touch a piece of your shadow, then use what emerges as a springboard for your writing to be stronger and truer than before.

Bill Mawhinney, the author of two collections of poetry Songs In My Begging Bowl and Cairns Along The Road, has worked as a prep school master, construction estimator, facilities engineer, and technical writer.   He's volunteered as a poet in elementary school classrooms, led monthly poetry circles at libraries, and performed poetry in local retirement homes.  He currently organizes and hosts the Northwind Reading Series in Port Townsend.

     In this all-day, double Saturday workshop, participants will learn how to unleash their inner child and inable it to write freely! Concentrating on the right-sided functioning brain Wingate & Persun will teach fundamental elements of writing the novel through snappy exercises that prevent your internal editor from seeping into your work.

     The first Saturday, March 24th, you will pinpoint deep character traits, develop strong scenes through the eyes of your narrator and build conflict so palpable that it will be difficult to tell if the story is fact or fiction.

     The second Saturday, March 31st, you will learn what makes good storytelling, good storytelling! Whether you write short stories or novels, flash fiction or single scenes, your story structure will grab your readers and keep them involved until the very final word. Wingate & Persun will discuss different methods of story structure and how employing structure can save you time bothering with rewrites.

Bios:

Winner of the Star of Washington Award and the POW! Award for Best Novel for his novels, sets Terry Persun apart from the rest. “Wolf’s Rite” won a ForeWord magazine Book of the Year Award as a finalist. Persun writes novels, poetry, short stories, and non-fiction. His novels have received acclaim in Publishers Weekly, Today’s Librarian, and The Light Connection, and numerous newspapers across the country. His poetry has appeared in Wisconsin Review, Kansas Quarterly, Yarrow, Riverrun, NEBO, Oyez Review, Colorado-North Review, Hiram Poetry Review, and many other small, literary publications and journals. You can learn more about Terry Persun at www.TerryPersun.com

Winner of the 2011 Forward National Literature Award for First Place in Drama and the 2011 International Book Awards as a finalist in women's fiction for "Drowning," put Susan Wingate on the map of award-winning novelists. She has been deemed “The master of the written word,” by bestselling, award-winning novelist Joshua Graham. She is also the co-host of the very popular talk radio show, “Dialogue: Between the Lines”. Susan has written nine novels, two short story collections, a few plays, one screenplay and tons of poems. Her books have received several awards in competitions. Susan writes under the pseudonyms of Myah Lin (literary fiction) and JJ Adams (noir mystery). For more information about Susan or to find out about her motivational public speaking, go to: www.susanwingate.com.

In the forest, the life down low, in dim light, is called the understory: salal, thimbleberry, maidenhair fern. In a life, the understory is that dimension of one's own story that has been hidden, saved within, not given to the light: secrets, losses, private stories of what might be, and what might have been. In this workshop, we will let the landscapes of our lives help us reveal our stories—the secrets we are ready to tell. Given light, salal grows tall.

The prevailing idea for the workshop is to reach into the shadows, where stories have been waiting for our attention. Not events, not actions, but stories—the knit knot of connections that surround a moment, a mystery, a silence in our lives. By not telling these mysteries we have, in fact, shaped them, prepared ourselves to acknowledge them, given them a place in our devotions. Now we can write them, freely, within the safe circle of our close attention, and then decide what to do with them, which parts of these stories to share beyond the candlelight.

About the Instructor

Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute and author of a dozen books of poetry and prose. His book, Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford (Graywolf Press) is a unique and revealing look at one of America’s best loved poets.

His other books include Having Everything Right: Essays of Place (Sasquatch Books), The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and other Pleseaures of the Writer’s Craft (U.Georgia Press), A Thousand Friends of Rain: New & Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press). 

He has taught writing workshops at Lewis & Clark College for thirty years, and at the annual Fishtrap Writers Gathering and colleges and literary centers across the U.S. and abroad. 


Website: www.kim-stafford.com

Materials List

Students Bring:
Paper and pen.

Instructor Provides: 
Handouts, readings, writing prompts.

Have you hit the point where you’re stuck in your story?

Do you need to find a more efficient way to create strong stories in a timely manner? Do you want to write a bigger, more complex, character-driven story?

Do you need a simple way to find plot holes? Would you like lots of one-on-one time over a two-day period with a multi-published author/writing craft instructor to make sure your plot is as strong as possible?

Author Mary Buckham is a national speaker who teamed up to create the highly successful Break Into Fiction® Template Teaching Series, which is now out in a book, Break Into Fiction: 11 steps to Building a Story that Sells. Join Mary as she shows you how to plot a strong story in two-days that will hum with potential.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Jon Franklin, who participated in a two-day Plotting Retreat with Mary, wrote a cover comment for their new book: “These writers know their business and, what¹s more, know how to explain it. Break into Fiction® is solidly grounded in storytelling fundamentals, but then goes much farther into the practical detail that determines whether your book will bring a check or a rejection slip.”

It’s not only what happened that makes a good story—it’s the meaning it holds for us that matters. This weekend workshop will help you discover the deeper meanings of your own story in a supportive atmosphere with a small group of other writers. How do you make sense out of the rawness of life? What are the patterns that emerge from the strands of your narrative? How do you stand in two places at once, looking back at the past while communicating whatever understanding you’ve managed to wrest from it? We’ll cover some of the essentials of craft, and do short writing exercises that will help you learn how to move between the narrative and the reflective voice. Saturday and Sunday afternoons will be devoted to reading, discussing, and critiquing your work and the work of the other of workshop participants. Writers of all levels are welcome. Don’t worry if you’re just beginning to work on your story—rough drafts, notes, dreams, sketches are where it all starts for every writer. Come be part of the First Draft Club. 

Kathryn Hunt is a writer and filmmaker and makes her home in Port Townsend. Her stories and poems have appeared in Rattle, The Sun, Willow Springs, Crab Orchard Review, and Open Spaces, among other magazines. She is a director and producer of documentary films, including Take this Heart, a feature-length documentary that was honored with the Anna Quindlen Award for Excellence in Journalism. Her film No Place Like Homewas screened at the Venice Biennale, in Italy, and premiered nationally on POV, a independent film series on PBS. She has recently completed a memoir, The Province of Leaves, the story of a mother and a daughter and the tangled, maddening, and abiding claims of family.