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...
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’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 do not remember exactly how I developed this huge attitude about Michael Chabon. I think it was the book Cavalier and Clay that sort of sealed it. We did not like the “innovative” language. But I have felt guilty about this for many reasons. Not only is Michael Chabon sort of local, and we should be nice to locals, but he is a brilliant writer in his way and also a father and...
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...