Interpretive Writing Intensive
Workshops, Ideas, & News for Interpreters Who Write

Greenfire Creative Logo

In This Issue
Behind the Scenes, part 2
Anza Borrego Writing Workshop

 Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt. 


Quick Links



for the


Visit our
Articles, essays, tips, & techniques

for writing, editing, & finding your story

Join Our Mailing List

Know someone who could use the information in this newsletter? Click "Forward email" at the bottom of the newsletter, or contact me and I'll add their name to the list.

Coming
in
2014!




Creating Stories that Make a Difference:

Advice & Guidance for Interpretive Writing and Writers

for the

Anza Borrego Foundation
Nature Writing Workshop
.
top
Behind the Scenes, part 2:
Creating a Writing Workshop


Welcome to part 2 of our multi-part series on Creating a Writing Workshop. If you missed part 1, you can read it HERE. This series is about creating a writing workshop (you probably guessed that), and about what happens in a good one.

I hope you enjoy today's installment--and I hope you'll check out our new nature writing workshop, sponsored by the Anza Borrego Foundation in Borrego Springs, California, too. It begins Sunday afternoon, January 26, at the Palm Canyon Resort.

You can see all the details here:
http://theabf.org/event/lectures/nature_writing_workshop

I hope you'll join us in Borrego Springs!

And now-part 2 of the story.

Part 2: Terrorists, cancer, and writing for my life

It's April, 2001, and some friends and I have just landed our first project for our brand new interp services company. We have grand plans and great hopes for Greenfire Creative, and even though the ink is barely dry on our business cards, a small science museum has asked us to create a new label for their gravity well. We're so thrilled to get the gig that we don't ask any of the questions I'd learned to ask during my years of managing tech writing and marketing projects.

Of course it turns into the project from Hades.

The review committee (it's a big committee) and the executive director argue (with each other and with us) over content and commas and how many changes equal a rewrite. The label's purpose and primary message change hourly. The designer threatens to quit. The content expert isn't. The back-up content expert isn't, either. I smile a lot and promise everybody that everything will be fine.

To my (and I suspect everyone else's) amazement, I'm right, even though we're ridiculously over-budget. Even that turns out okay, because we agree to donate the cost overruns, and the executive director agrees to list us as a corporate sponsor for a couple of years.

The museum signs off on the project and pays us in early August, 2001. We take it as a good omen and begin looking for more projects. Soon, we have names and promises of projects to come. In marketing terms, we're filling the pipeline, and we're filling it fast.

To celebrate, I balance a penny in the gravity well's ramp. It wobbles, but starts its way down.

I know that the full preferred term is "terrorist action of September 11, 2001," but to me, it will always be simply, "nine-eleven." I heard it first on KUNC's Morning Edition report. My husband (who works for United Airlines) called from his office and told me to turn on the TV. I saw the images but my brain couldn't process them; I didn't understand what I was seeing for a long time.

It was much easier to understand what happened later: all but two of our initial interp services group decided to do other things with their lives. That was okay; we understood why. The two of us who remained understood why all our prospective business vanished that day, too. No one knew if we were at war, or about to be, or what that would mean. No one was travelling; no tourism meant no money for new interpretive projects.

We didn't have "real jobs" to fall back on, even if anyone had been hiring. We scrambled to fill our calendars with the familiar billable time of freelance writing and editing, some interp, most not. We presented sessions at conferences--mine on marketing at NAI's annual workshop, Deb's on rare sheep breeds at ALBC's. By springtime, Deb had completed work on a new edition of Knitting in the Old Way and quite by surprise, discovered she had a best-selling craft book and a rapidly growing small publishing firm to tend. I re-geared Greenfire Creative to do the work I felt most drawn to: helping people tell their stories, in whatever way and by whatever method they needed.

When I talk about the months following nine-eleven, it sounds like I kept a stiff upper lip and soldiered on, tough and stoic and working hard. There's some truth to that (at least I like to think so), but what's more true is that the penny rolling down the ramp of the gravity well was moving of its own accord, following the laws of physics as it slid into the arc of the first spiral. What's true is that I wrote almost every day, whether anyone was paying me or not. What's true is that because I wrote, I could find my way through the fear, emerging into something like safety, wobbling but still rolling on that narrow copper edge.

The thing that always puzzles me about the penny rolling into the gravity well is how it almost always stays on its edge. I understand the physics of the trajectory, why the path is a spiral, and how to use the penny and gravity well to explain why Skylab and Mir fell to Earth and the moon hasn't. But I don't understand what keeps the penny upright. If you start it rolling on its edge, it stays on its edge, all the way down, like a magically balanced unicycle. Once begun, it never falls over.

In 2002, mine fell over.

It happened in the cold dark of an early December morning, just after my son's 18th birthday, when the surgeon plucked a lymph node the size of a golf ball out of my son's neck, proof of Hodgkin's Lymphoma.

When the penny falls over, it slides straight down the side of the well and vanishes into a black maw.

For long moments after the doctor said the words he had to say, the only sound I heard was that penny skidding to oblivion. The fear that filled me was so profound, so primal, that it defies expression. Some part of me followed the coin, disappearing into elsewhere. The part left behind became a warrior's mask, used to defend my son against the invasion breaching his lymph nodes.

During the months of chemo, the months of our "new normal" lives, I can't write, I won't write--except that I do. Not for clients, although I tried at first, finally admitting defeat: I am not a woman of infinite capacity after all.

I fill notebook after notebook with the details of my life, descriptions of the treatment room chairs, of the others quietly undergoing their own treatment, of the shared jokes, of how stupid the cardiologist makes me feel, and how friendly the nurses at the imaging center are. I record entire conversations between my son and his friends (my favorite: Friend, clearly worried: So, does this mean you're going to die? Kyle, confident: Well, of course I'm going to die. But not today, and not from this.). I write, making myself real on the page. I endure. I survive, and so does my son.

Years later, the notebooks, which I stored in cardboard boxes under the old dining room table I use as a desk, will be drenched when the drainback pipe for our solar heating system ruptures--ironically, perhaps, on the last day of a 4-day writing workshop I was teaching at the NAI office--and I will fight with the insurance company to reimburse the cost of photocopying every soggy page before mold sets in. The insurance company finally does.

Key takeaways I build into my workshops
  • The times when you think you can't write are the times when you must write. I'm not being flippant--I know first-hand that it's hard and often scary; I also know it is absolutely necessary and it can be done. My workshops include guidance, ideas, and practice, all in a supportive environment, that help you write even when you think you can't.
  • The topics you think you can't write about--because you're afraid, or you think nobody will be interested, or because you've been told they're taboo or no one will ever publish anything on that topic or everything possible about that topic has already been published--those are the topics you must tackle. Every writer is unique; each of us has our own voice as a writer and our own stories. My workshops are safe places to write, explore, experiment, and write (yes, "write" is there twice--we do a lot of writing!).
  • Writing can change the world, but often, it changes the writer first. The stronger and more skillful you are as a writer, the more significant the change. The way to become stronger and more skillful is to write, to practice, to share your work in a safe and supportive setting, and to write some more.
NEXT:
Stay tuned for Part 3: The call of the cowbell
(If you've just joined in, you can read part 1 here.)

In the meantime, check out the Anza Borrego Foundation Nature Writing Workshop.
Register soon--we begin with a short meeting on Sunday afternoon, January 26. That's only 16 days away!

https://connect.theabf.org/events/nature-writing-workshop


'Til next time--
Judy

Comments? Questions?
970/416-6353
email Judy
FN
 

back to top

.
topdetails
 NATURE WRITING WORKSHOPsponsored by theAnza Borrego Foundation 

Sunday, Jan. 26, 2014 (afternoon)
through
Thursday night, Jan. 30, 2014
(with optional group gathering Friday morning,
Jan. 31, before check-out)

Palm Canyon Resort
Borrego Springs, CA
 (about 2 hours east of San Diego)

Give your writing a boost in 2014!

Join the Anza Borrego Foundation (ABF) and Palm Canyon Resort for a 4-1/2 day writing workshop led by Judy Fort Brenneman. Over the course of the workshop, you'll go on 2 field trips, have daily workshop sessions with different topics of focus, an optional one-on-one session with Judy, and time to write, reflect, and explore.

Unlike conferences where you only talk about writing, at the ABF nature writing workshop,
you'll write.
  • Whether you write poetry or prose, nonfiction or fiction--
  • Whether you're sure you're a "nature writer" or not sure what "nature writing" really is--
  • Whether you're a beginner or a long-time story-maker--
You'll venture deeper into your writing, making more progress than you thought possible in such a short time.

WORKSHOP & LODGING DETAILS HERE.

REGISTER HERE

STILL HAVE QUESTIONS?

Email Judy or call 970/416-6353.



Palm Canyon Resort Hotel
Palm Canyon Resort, Borrego Springs, CA

About the Instructor: Judy Fort Brenneman is an award-winning author, essayist, and playwright as well as a popular writing workshop leader and writing coach. Through her company, Greenfire Creative, LLC, she helps people, agencies, and organizations tell their stories. To learn more, visit our website or contact Judy
by email:  judyb@greenfire-creative.com
or by phone: 970/416-6353



back to top

.

Greenfire Creative Logo
we help you tell the story
 
.

Palm Canyon Resort hotel photograph courtesy Palm Canyon Resort. All other content and photographs copyright © Judy Fort Brenneman. Request reprint permission through Greenfire Creative, LLC.