The parent category for all the different workshops–Amherst Writers and Artists, in-person, online, retreats, and Finishing School.
Lucy Hilmer has been a regular at Cary’s writing practice table at Café La Boheme in San Francisco, for the past 2 ½ years. Lucy is a fine art photographer, documentary filmmaker and poet, who spends most of her time working alone in her home studio. But every Friday at noon, she heads to the Mission to sit with Cary’s pop up community of creative people for an hour, where she and others fast...
Happy New Year! After slowing down for the holidays, Cary and I are back working at full speed. The “Featured Person of the Week” is back, as are more columns and creative writing from Cary. A note: because many commenters have mentioned that they would like the ability to edit their comments after they post them, we’ve changed our method of posting comments. You now need to log in to our...
What our friend Brian Herrera wrote today about his experience at the Creative Getaway at Marconi spurred some thoughts of my own which I’d like to share — with people who’ve had this experience and with people who perhaps do not know about the Amherst Writers and Artists method or the creative getaways Norma and I have put on since 2008. Actually, I have a lot to say so...
We first met Brian Herrera at our first-ever Creative Getaway. An exceptionally talented and inventive writer, he amazed us all during our evening reading sessions by one moment reading us the most deeply moving piece, and the next reading something that would leave the entire room in tears of laughter. Here’s what Brian has to say about himself, the Creative Getaway, and his new project...
Chloë Delafield has been a regular at Cary’s writing workshop for a number of years and went on to publish one of her pieces in the Sun magazine. Chloë is on the board of directors for Green Branch, a mobile children’s library dedicated to social justice and the environment. Green Branch has existed as a pop-up reading room for the past year and is now raising funds for a bookmobile...
After the Saturday workshop I settle on the couch reading The Maverick Poets, that book edited by Steve Kowit, who I was lodging next to down at the Sun Esalen thing. But the thing I love after the workshop is that feeling afterwards like we’ve all been together in this room dreaming out loud together. So then I read that poem by Bukowski about the cat, “The History of a Tough...
Books I checked out of the library and read and enjoyed in 2013: Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story. Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. Rober Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream. and Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. Kind of an end-of-the-year thing. I read lots more books than that, but these stood out. (The below is verbatim from my San...
To begin without knowing how to do it: That has been my approach, and I have agonized like a man sitting in a field with many ingredients of a house laid out before him and a panicked feeling that he has begun before he is ready. He has begun without a plan. He has no blueprint. He simply got it into his head that he could dredge up many interesting things from the well and the lake and the river...
Cary first met Michele Crockett at his Amherst Writers and Artists-style online workshop and since that time Michele has gone on to receive her own AWA certification. In May 2013 Michele was certified by the fabulous Maureen Buchanan Jones, Executive Director, AWA. Although Michele is currently working as Graduate Faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she is also working to...
Yesterday in my intro to the column I mentioned “how we need to fill the January getaway,” and that apparently set off some worries, like, it won’t be cancelled, will it? Of course not. The Creative Getaway Jan. 17-20, 2014 at Marconi Conference Center is definitely happening. It’s just that some people who were hoping to make it found they couldn’t come, so there...
Kathy Dolbow Doran was ‘present at the creation’ at Cary’s first Creative Getaway and attended two others which she claims to be among the best times of her life. She has a full-time writing position, but is in the midst of starting a movement for displaced Baby Boomers called 50 Plus Reinvented. Kathy was horrified to learn about the 50% increase in Baby Boomer suicides from...
Dear Reader, Well, I’m in Monterey this morning, here to help some writers. Also here to write on my own. When I was writing the Since You Asked column for Salon.com, which I did for nearly 12 years, every day I wrote it I wanted to be proud. It was an extraordinary opportunity for a writer, for someone who really doesn’t know how to do much else and so has had to find jobs writing...
Dear Cary, What a delight that you are continuing. Bravo! The quality of the world dipped there for a moment, but now it is leveled up again, thank, goodness. I’ll be sure to do my part to spread the word so that everyone I know can enjoy your column. On another note, I do want to ask you a few related questions about my writing. Some background: On a deep and sweet level, I am an...
Our featured person for this week is Amy Souza. Not only is Amy a talented writer, but she is a visual artist as well. In 2008 Amy founded Spark, a quarterly call-and-response project in which artists, writers, and musicians have ten days to create something new using another person’s art or writing as inspiration. Here’s what Amy has to say about herself and the Spark project: I have...
Over the six years Cary’s been leading writing retreats and workshops, we have gotten to know an impressive number of people working on some truly intriguing projects. Many of these projects are creative, some just simply improve life on this planet. This wonderful community has grown so large that we’ve decided to feature a person each week to highlight their creative or other...
Over the past six years of writing workshops and retreats we have met so many extraordinary people with extraordinary stories to tell that Cary and I decided to feature a person every week and share their writing or other creative project with rest of our writing community. My pick for this first column is Archana Kalegaonkar. We first met Archana at our 2013 writing retreat in Tuscany. After...
I found out how truly unsystematic I am by setting a schedule for myself and not following it. That happened because I invented Finishing School. I invented Finishing School because I wanted to finish things I start. I wanted to finish things I start because I feel crummy when I don’t. Crummy is a polite word. Also I’m too hard on myself. I had two therapists in one day tell me that...
Even from as far away as Australia, I could feel the relaxed, open atmosphere he created among us and found it surprisingly easy to get writing. — Alice Allan, Melbourne, Australia I was writing descriptions without events, like jokes without punch-lines. The workshops led me to try more active, engaging and complex storytelling. I gave up some fixed ideas about what kinds of writing I do and...
Here are some of the links I mentioned in the 2013 Santa Barbara Novel Mentor workshop, about dialog, pitches, queries and beginnings of novels. dialog Writing Dialog by Tom Chiarella. I lent this book to somebody and have to get it back. It’s a good book. Useful. Interesting. 12 Exercises for improving dialog by John Hewitt. Some of these are pretty good. You can’t go wrong trying...
I just checked out our Yelp reviews today and I am honored and grateful for all the really thoughtful, funny and kind reviews we received. Here are a few of my favorite outtakes: “I still don’t understand exactly how it works, but every Wednesday evening, when I’m tired from the day, not feeling particular creative or even enthusiastic, I sit down to write with Cary and the...
Cary’s first-ever Tuscan writing retreat went better than we could ever have imagined. First of all, we’d like to thank all of our participants who traveled from all over the world to attend. After years of putting on writing retreats, we’ve noticed that those who participate in Cary’s events are a very special breed: talented, creative, intelligent, adventurous, fun...
I’ll be the first to admit it–I have a love/hate relationship with Finishing School. But at the end of last month’s session, I had gleaned 10 great lessons from the experience. Here they are: 1) I increased my tolerance. I had a fairly clear schedule in April and I thought that I’d just sit down and write for six hours, because that’s the time I’d carved out in...
The June 2012 issue of The Sun features a generous excerpt of Citizens of the Dream, my book about creativity. It runs after a fascinating interview with painter Ran Ortner and a lovely poem by Alison Luterman, and right before a poem by Tony Hoagland! What humbling and awe-inspiring company! It says quite a lot that The Sun saw fit to showcase the book. After you read the excerpt, I suggest you...
I find it hard not to work. It’s a Sunday afternoon, Norma and I did brunch at Zuni with Karen, then hung out at Green Arcade Books, enjoying the poetry and the cool local books and talking with Dave about labor history and how the minute there’s a museum about your movement you know you’re in trouble (“Fossilized Bongos in the Haight!”) and about the business of...
Reading a story in the New Yorker and fighting thoughts of jealousy and class resentment, thinking, how did I end up doing the workshops and getaways and publishing the books in addition to writing the column and thinking, if I had enough money, would I be preparing for the workshop–vacuuming the floor and straightening the furniture and getting ready for folks to come into the living room...
Rooming with Sy Safransky. We got to talk under the stars Friday night about this and that. Talking with Sy it’s never about this and that but it’s always kinda about this and that which makes it akin to the lightly ordered musings you find in the magazine. Writers giving workshops included poet Chris Burks, whose performances and performance-art-type gifts — a stone, a bell...