Taffeta, Fame and Champagne on St. Mark’s Place: Blogging Grandma Maggie's Diary

PIMA College Writing Workshop

June 1st, 2009 by suzanne

Here I post diary entries from my grandma Maggie's (rather famous) late 1930s diary and fiery truth and wild musings from my writer's life in Brattleboro Vermont in the 21st century.

I will be in Tucson, Arizona at the PIMA College Writing Workshop from May 27th-June 1st lecturing about Zen and the Creative Process, reading from the new novel, The Peace of Wild Things, doing a workshop on Skeletons in the Closet, Creating Intimacy With Your First Person Narrator, sitting on a panel, talking about the writing process and doing manuscript critique. The conference is one of the most accessible in the Southwest at $80 per student for the whole weekend and free manuscript critique.

Meg Files, the director of PIMA college’s creative program says she likes to put a positive spin on the conference and calls it “Meatloaf” instead of “Breadloaf”. This year poet and translator Marilyn Nelson is here along with Jungian analyst Linda Leonard, Children’s author, Jennifer Ward, nature, science and history writer, Gary Ferguson and short story writer Eric Witchey, among others.

4 Responses to “PIMA College Writing Workshop”

  1. on 01 Jun 2009 at 2:22 pm kathy salazar said

    good afternoon Suzanne,

    THANK YOU THAN YOU THANK YOU!

    i was an attendee this weekend at the workshop and am so grateful for your learned instructions. I am just beginning the journey to writing a fictionalized memoir about my very dysfunctional Celtic family from Seattle.

    I now have been able to learn from you how to put the creativity into the process.i am a real whole brainer,having the process somewhat in hand, and with your great guidance this weekend know i can initiate the right side of my brain as well.

    in addition am so very grateful for the integrated approach of physical mental and spiritual – i am a catholic and a 30 yr student of yoga…it is what gives me oxygen on days when i am breathless.

    you are indeed a teacher extraordinaire – the ideas are cogent, well presented as well as comprehensible.
    Kathy

  2. on 02 Jun 2009 at 8:58 am Hollis Fingold said

    Hello Suzanne,
    I can’t wait to have the new book in my hands. The reading you did at Pima College on Friday whetted my appetite for a having a new Kingsbury novel on my bedside table. The characters in the excerpt are already running around in my head, sweating through the heat of Panama and their place in time. I feel the fear and machismo of the drug culture and insanity in the streets of a dictator-ruled country. I won’t know what happens to that vulgar, fat, oddly sensuous woman and she’ll sit on my mind for a long time taunting me. Must have more!_____ Hollis FIngold

  3. on 05 Jun 2009 at 11:06 am Olivia Harrison Clawson said

    I just think you are wonderful and I am glad that it comes out loud and clear in everything you do. The world benefits from your insights and influences. Cheers to you, Suzanne.

  4. on 12 Jul 2009 at 11:57 am kathy cowan said

    Hola Suzanne. I just finished being in that room with Kelly, cole and Gracey Fill and am all filled up with feelings: awe at the sheer closeness I felt to being in the experience with the characters, sadness with the knowledge that these people with their extreme addictions really do exist, and joy that some of the lucky ones survive. It’s a fine book. I want to play Audrey’s mother in the movie.

    You were my lovely reader at the Pima Writers’ Conference. You told me I am a good writer. You even said this in front of some other people there. When I got home I stared at my writing, and I had a hard time believing you. I thought maybe you told everyone that. But you also showed me how to ground my story in details, to keep my readers with me. When I read your writing now I look for the ways you do this.

    Today i found your blog and wolfed it down. You amaze me in the way you move around and immerse yourself, swallowing everything around you and then you write it down so that we readers can experience it that way too. Write on! I’m off to get your next book. Thanks for everything.
    kc

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