The Skylark Mission
Skylark Writing Studio provides workshops, coaching and encouragement for writers
- who take their work (but not themselves) seriously
- who believe that love of the words is more important than word counts or gimmicks
- who embrace revision and finding the right words instead of the almost-right words
- who read for pleasure and read to learn how other writers work with words
- who know that all creative artists continue to study and learn about their art
- who want to put their names only on the best work they can create
- who experience writing as joy and not drudgery.
If you are a beginning writer, you’ll be one who is willing to keep the Skylark mission statement in mind when signing up for a workshop or when you request coaching help.
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NEW FOR SPRING!
Three half-day writing workshops at the Coupeville Library:
- Friday, March 16 - "What Would Steinbeck Do?"
- Friday, April 20 - "Zen & the Art of Writing"
- Friday, May 11 - "Everything Else I Know About Writing, I Learned in Jazz Clubs"
These workshops are designed to sharpen your work, add depth, and strengthen your unique voice. The exercises in each workshop can be applied to fiction or nonfiction projects you may already have underway or new projects you may have in mind.
Friday, March 16 - "What Would Steinbeck Do?" offers writing exercises based on the work and words of master writers like John Steinbeck, Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Annie Dillard, John Updike and others. Writers have a lot to learn from the masters of the written word, but the craft of excellent writing sometimes gets lost in all the workshops about publishing and marketing. The masters are more than willing to offer their best advice, and my work as a teacher and writing coach is to pass that good advice along.
Friday, April 20 - "Zen and the Art of Writing" is a workshop designed to teach you how to see in a new way and to record what you're seeing. Exercises in focus and concentration based in part on Frederick Franck's Zen and the Art of Seeing, combined with other writing exercises will offer useful tools for both prose writers and poets. You'll learn a simple, meditative drawing exercise as part of the workshop. No art experience is necessary.
Friday, May 11 - "Everything Else I Know About Writing, I Learned in Jazz Clubs," is based on my experience writing a jazz novel, but the workshop has broader value to writers. Creativity is the through-line in all the arts - music, dance, visual art, performance and writing. And what works in one art can be translated into useful lessons for another. In this workshop, you'll do exercises that draw on each of the other arts to inform your writing and bring it to new, surprising and exciting places!
Workshops are $48 each and run from 1 p.m.- 5 p.m. each afternoon. The workshops are sponsored by Whidbey Island Arts Council in partnership with Skylark to benefit WIAC's Literary Arts programs and scholarships for young writers.
Space is limited to 12 participants and PRE-REGISTRATION AND PAYMENT ARE REQUIRED! You'll bring paper and pen or pencil - no laptops, please. Also bring a one page sample of your writing - a page from a story or nonfiction piece is fine.
Please register with the form below or by contacting me at 360/678-3042 or jazzcookie@frontier.com
Name_____________________________________________________________________
Mailing Address_____________________________________________________________
Day Phone _______________________________________________
E-mail ___________________________________________________
Please make your check payable to Whidbey Island Arts Council and mail to:
Molly Cook, P.O. Box 243, Coupeville, WA 98239
Workshops, $48 each
____ March 16, What Would Steinbeck Do?
____ April 20, Zen & the Art of Writing
____ May 11, Everything Else I Know About Writing, I Learned in
Jazz Clubs
Total enclosed: $___________
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