What She Might Think: Visual Art, Writing, Grief, and More at the 2019 Spokane Writers Conference

2019 Spokane Writers Conference

Spokane County Library

North Spokane Library, 44 East Hawthorne Road

Saturday, October 26

Sunday, October 27

Free to all

Click for workshop menu and registration.

North Spokane Library

I'm pleased to be a part of this year's annual Spokane Writers Conference, held by and at the Spokane County Library. I'm joining a roster of wonderful writers and instructors who will lead and participate in discussions and workshops about books, reading, writing, aspects of the drafting process, skills and drills, and everything you might imagine from here to there when you're thinking about words on a page.
On Sunday, October 27, I'll facilitate two workshops, both revolving around subjects that affect every aspect of my own writing process and that I doubt I'm alone in. I hope you can join me.

🖉

Using Visual Art for Inspiration

October 27, 2019
1:15-2:15
Visual artists are often speaking to the same concerns, desires, and problems that writers are in our work. We cover ways of viewing contemporary visual art that inspire ideas on days when creativity feels beyond reach. Be ready to engage in several writing activities.
Sign up! (Free)

Van Gogh, Three Hands, Two with Knives

Here's why I wanted to create this workshop: I grew up surrounded by my father's love of art. Our backyard held his modernist sculptures that he re-spray painted every few years, and that I was attracted to but warned not to play near because the design inadvertently attracted wasps. He'd dabbled in wood sculpture, metal, plaster. His oil paintings hung in the garage that he'd converted into a workshop.

At the library, we'd sit between the shelves, turning the pages of the cement-heavy art books of Renoir and whatever other classics our rural library had. He drove the roads and walked fields searching for the best light, camera bag on his shoulder (and he'd made the red and yellow lanyard for the zipper pull, which still pleases me, though I'm not sure why).

I suspected, as did everyone, that my own life would follow similar but perhaps more explicit artistic avenues. Instead of a garage, galleries. Instead of only books, museums. In short, the way the American Dream colored my future in.

Life did not pan that way, but central to my storytelling, written or aloud, is the image. I simply work in the medium of words rather than oil, pastel, charcoal. And I feed my sense of self by viewing photography and art, participating in the dialogue that artists create through their images, and respond through language in the way I do.

As such, I look forward to facilitating this workshop on Visual Art as Inspiration, as well as the conversations, activities, and art we'll explore together.

🖉

Writing with Grief

October 27, 2019
3:00-4:15
Mourning is a long and varied process, which may restrict or dampen creativity. We look at strategies for writing after the loss of a loved one and ways to write with the grief instead of fighting it or feeling overtaken by it.
Sign up! (Free)

Image from page 28 of "Bird-lore" (1899)

The second workshop I'll lead revolves around grief, which certainly would not have been my chosen topic years ago, but after a long decade of close death, from my father to my best friend to my sister, each dying differently, each beloved to me in different dimensions, their lives and the vanished nature of death has deeply imprinted my way of thinking, responding, loving, and thus, writing. (Not to mention that I grew up in a rural town that, during my childhood, was dying in population, trade, and hope, certainly set the stage of perspective on daily dying and the rituals connected to it.)

Because grief is such an intimate experience, often lonely, often isolating, often suffocating, we may not write, we may write pages and pages, we may not see the crisp lines of autumn leaves and lose the interest in waiting for the beauty to return, or believing that it will, or that it should in exactly the way it was before. With each death I experience, my writing seems differently affected. Beauty, grief, and language affect each other in ways we don't anticipate. Or, at least, I didn't. But this workshop will not be a monologue on my loss but tangible ways to navigate your writing through mourning, its relationship to identity and creativity--wherever you are in time and loss. While I am a fiction writer and prefer writing fiction to non-fiction, writers of any genre or level of truth-telling are welcome and encouraged to participate.

(This is not necessarily a workshop on how to write about grief, though I'm sure we'll talk about that, this will be about writing while grieving, as I suspect grieving never ends, merely rubbing itself into one's identity until it's impossible to separate one from another. Perhaps I should have named it Grieving and Writing. Or just Writing.)

Please join me.

If you have any questions about my specific workshops, feel free to message me. Of course, direct any general inquiries about the conference to the librarians, as they are the ones in the know.

Spokane Writers Conference