The Writing Show

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Recap

Pencil by Kathleen Sams Flippen

Description

Are you exhausted by your own mind? Struggling with writer’s block? Dejected by rejection? Do you need encouragement and solutions? Learn from writers who have been there and come out the other side. Join us for this month’s Writing Show for a healthy dose of inspiration on how to cope, from storming through that first draft to facing the publication process.

Award-winning young adult author Gigi Amateau will lead this month’s panel discussion on ways to overcome common pitfalls. Whether you struggle with establishing a routine, need a fresh approach, or simply want to feel less alone in the battle, come armed with questions and walk away recharged and ready to write.

Featuring Valley Haggard, Eliezer Sobel, and Louise Hawes.

Panelists

ValleyHaggard3Valley Haggard is a freelance writer and creative writing teacher in the Richmond area. She teaches writing-from-life and creative nonfiction classes, workshops and retreats for adults at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Black Swan Books, Chop Suey Books and retreat centers around Virginia. She also teaches year-round for Richmond Young Writers, which she founded at Chop Suey Books in 2009 with the intention of introducing young people to the joy and craft of creative writing. She served as Style Weekly’s Book Editor from 2004-2011 and has taught creative writing classes for ART 180, the Virginia Museum, the Children’s Museum of Richmond, and the UVA Young Writer’s Workshop. Haggard has a BA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has served on the board of James River Writers.

 

MeNewEliezer Sobel is a writer, musician and teacher who lives in Richmond. His books include The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist’s Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness Raising Experiments (2009), as well as Minyan: Ten Jewish Men in a World That is Heartbroken (2004), which won the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, and Wild Heart Dancing: A Personal One-Day Quest to Liberate the Artist and Lover Within. (1994). Spending time with his 86-year-old mother in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease inspired Blue Sky White Clouds: A Book for Memory-Challenged Adults (2012). He was also the Publisher and Editor of the Wild Heart Journal, the New Sun magazine, and writes online for Psychology Today, Reality Sandwich, and the Huffington Post. Eliezer has led creativity and meditation retreats around the U.S. and is a certified teacher of The 5 Rhythms™ movement practice developed by Gabrielle Roth.

 

LouiseLouise Hawes is the author of two short fiction collections and over a dozen novels. Her work, for readers of all ages, has won awards from Banks Street College, the NJ Council on the Arts, the New York City Public Library, the Children’s Book Council, the Independent Booksellers Association, the International Reading Association, and the American Association of University Women, among others. Anteaters Don’t Dream, a collection of her stories, earned her a visit to Ole Miss as a John Grisham Visiting Author. Most recently, she collaborated with four other authors to produce A Flight of Angels, named one of the Ten Great Graphic Novels of 2013 by the American Library Association. Louise helped found and teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program, and has guest lectured throughout the United States. Louise and her three sisters, a painter, a filmmaker, and a musician, are currently offering Four Sisters Playshops around the world to give participants the chance to explore images, words, and song, and then to make an animated film about their experience.

 

Moderator

GigiAmateauGigi Amateau is the author of Claiming Georgia Tate, selected as a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age and hailed by author Judy Blume: “It’s rare and exciting to discover a talented new writer like Gigi Amateau.” She is also the author of A Certain Strain of Peculiar, a Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year, and Chancey of the Maury River, A William Allen White Masters list title for grades 3-5. Come August, Come Freedom, her first work of historical fiction, was selected by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance as a Fall 2012 Okra Pick and chosen by Bank Street College as a Best Children’s Book of the Year. In 2012, Gigi received a Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts from Richmond magazine. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in urban studies and planning from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), and has worked in the health and human services sector for more than twenty years. Born in northeastern Mississippi in 1964, she was raised in Mechanicsville, Virginia, and lives in the city of Richmond. She serves on the James River Writers Advisory Board.

 

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