A Writer’s Workshop: Daily Creative Practices for Writing Stories, Poems and Non-fiction — Oct. 1, 2024
The Workshop
Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024, 6 - 7:30 p.m.
The Common Well Boise (Google Maps)
110 W. 31st Street in Garden City, Idaho
Aurora Stone Mehlman, William Guy Miller and Jeffery Oliver will lead this free workshop and craft talk on how writers can learn and create new daily practices to improve their craft and creative output. Writers of any age are invited to bring paper and pens/pencils to write through exercises with the artists in this interactive workshop and craft talk.
The workshop is FREE and no reservation is necessary. Mhelman, Miller and Oliver present this workshop as part of their residency with the Alexa Rose Foundation and The Common Well Boise.
Workshop Readings
The Writing Life (excerpt)
Annie Dillard
What is this writing life? I was living alone in a house once, and had set up a study on the first floor. A portable green Smith-Corona typewriter sat on the table against the wall. I made the mistake of leaving the room.
I was upstairs when I felt the first tremor. The floor wagged under my feet—what was that?—and the picture frames on the wall stirred. The house shook and made noise. There was a pause; I found my face in the dresser mirror, deadpan. When the floor began again to sway, I walked downstairs, thinking I had better get down while the stairway held.
I saw at once that the typewriter was erupting. The old green Smith-Corona typewriter on the table was exploding with fire and ash. Showers of sparks shot out of its caldera-the dark hollow in which the keys lie. Smoke and cinders poured out, noises exploded and spattered, black dense smoke rose up, and a wild, deep fire lighted the whole thing. It shot sparks.
I pulled down the curtains. When I leaned over the typewriter, sparks burnt round holes in my shirt, and fire singed my sleeve. I dragged the rug away from the sparks. In the kitchen I filled a bucket with water and returned to the erupting typewriter. The typewriter did not seem to be flying apart, only erupting. On my face and hands I felt the heat from the caldera. The yellow fire made a fast, roaring noise. The typewriter itself made a rumbling, grinding noise; the table pitched. Nothing seemed to require my bucket of water. The table surface was ruined, of course, but not aflame. After twenty minutes or so, the eruption subsided.
That night I heard more rumblings-weak ones, ever farther apart. The next day I cleaned the typewriter, table, floor, wall, and ceiling. I threw away the burnt shirt. The following day I cleaned the typewriter again—a film of lampblack still coated the caldera—and then it was over. I have had no trouble with it since. Of course, now I know it can happen.
Early in the Morning
Li-Young Lee
While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher’s ink.
She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.
My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.
But I know
it is because of the way
my mother’s hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.
A Farewell to Arms (first paragraph)
Ernest Hemingway
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
Resources
Aurora Stone Mehlman
For further consideration
“The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard
“Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg
“The Promise of Failure” by John McNally
Currently reading
“When We Cease to Understand the World” by Benjamin Labatut
“The Solace of Open Spaces” by Gretel Ehrlich
“The Shining” by John Fosse
William Guy Miller
For further consideration
Best American… series, O. Henry Prize and Pushcart Prize anthologies, etc.
“The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Hemingway Library Edition” by Ernest Hemingway — This edition indicates revisions and edits.
“The Art of Revision: The Last Word” by Peter Ho Davies
Booker Prize and National Book Award long lists and similar prize listings (available on the web)
Poets and Writers (magazine and website) — New prompts every week at the website, as well as articles and interviews on writing
Paris Review (print journal and website)
Writers’ workshops at the Cabin Literary Center
Currently reading
“Arcadia: A Novel” by Lauren Groff
“The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020” by Rachel Kushner
“The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories” edited by Jay Rubin
“The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11” by Garrett M. Graff
“The Best of It: New and Selected Poems” by Kay Ryan
Jeffery Oliver
For further consideration
“The Creative Act: A way of being” by Rick Rubin
“The War of Art” and “Turning Pro” by Steven Pressfield
“Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?” by Kenneth Koch
The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org) and the Academy of America Poets (www.poets.org)
Walt whitman, Frank O’Hara, Bob Hicok, Emily Dickinson, Li-Young Lee, Amanda Gorman, C.D. Wright, Mary Jo Bang…
Currently reading
“The Landscape Within: Insights and inspirations for photographers” by David Ward
“Delivery: A novel” by Tomás Hulick Baiza
“Chris Marker: Early Film Writings” by Chris Marker
“The Sunflower Casts a Spell to Save Us From the Void” poems by Jackie Wang
“Raised by Wolves: Fifty poets on fifty poems” a Graywolf Anthology (get to know your favorite publishers)
The Facilitators
Aurora Stone Mehlman is an author and professor at Boise State University and College of Western Idaho and calls Boise home. Mehlman's fiction is lyrical and poetic, mysterious and magical. Her characters breathe and exist indelibly in the reader's consciousness.
William Guy Miller is a Boise-based writer of long format fiction involving immersive field and text- based research. His work focuses on character and conflict as functions of physical and cultural landscapes, specific times and places, and related issues of agency, identity, consequence, and language.
Multimedia poet and photographer Jeffery Oliver grew up and received his bachelor of arts in music in Arkansas; worked as a musician, arts administrator and web designer in the San Francisco Bay area; earned an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Arts at the University of Alaska Anchorage where he began creating multimedia poetry works; and continues to create poetry experiences in Boise, Idaho. Oliver creates immersive multimedia poetry experiences utilizing digital, analog and alternative processes that combine text, photography, voice over, field recordings and music. His poems have appeared in print and digital literary journals, as videopoems in online journals, as installations in art galleries and as live performances across the United States.
Miller and Oliver have new artworks in the “Show & Tell” residency exhibition currently on view at The Common Well Boise. All works are for sale through the gallery which is open Monday-Friday, 9am - 5pm through Oct. 4, 2024.