I will be taking registrations
throughout the month of September. I’ll need a final count by October 1 for the caterer. Join us!
Meanwhile, keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
Author Archives: jessicapage2
Midge Raymond on Naming Characters
Midge Raymond has excellent advice on naming your characters. You can find her blog here. Romeo and Juliet–classic examples. 
Midge will be teaching a workshop on marketing and will also take part in a panel on branding at Claim Your Story II, October 4.
Reminder: October 5 is the final day to receive room discount
If you’re attending the conference and don’t live in the Ashland area, please make your reservations at Lithia Springs Resort by Friday, October 5 to receive the discount.
The place is incredible–restful and lovely and filled with small thoughtful touches that make your stay more enjoyable. Jay and I are looking forward to our third stay there.
Be sure to mention “writer’s workshop” to receive your discounted rate.
Thanks,
Jessica
According to Studs Terkel:
People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, a form of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another.
Registration is now open for Claim Your Story 2014
October 4, 2014
Lithia Springs Resort, Ashland, Oregon
And here’s a nugget for you:
“Stars were the first text, the first instance of gabbiness; connecting the stars, making a pattern out of them, was the first story, sacred to storytellers. But the moon was the first poem, in the lyric sense, an entity complete in itself, recognizable at a glance, one that played upon the emotions so strongly that the context of time and place hardly seemed to matter.” – Mary Ruefle 
Carpe diem
“‘Carpe diem’ doesn’t mean seize the day – it means something gentler and more sensible. ‘Carpe diem’ means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be ‘cape diem,’ if my school Latin serves . . . What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things . . . Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant – pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it.”
– Nicholson Baker
Melissa Hart as Keynote Speaker
I’m so happy to announce that Melissa Hart will be the keynote speaker at the 2014 Claim Your Story 
Conference. Check out Melissa’s well-stocked resume below. She’s a regular workshop leader and speaker at writers’ conference and we heard raves about her workshops at Summer in Words 2013. She’ll be teaching a workshop on scenes in memoir and fiction and her keynote address is Write What You’d Most Want to Read.
Melissa Hart is the author of the memoirs Wild Within: How Rescuing Owls Inspired a Family (Globe Pequote/Lyons 2014) and Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood (Seal, 2009). She’s a columnist for The Writer Magazine, and her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Orion, High Country News, Hemispheres, and numerous other publications. She teaches at the School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon. Web: www.melissahart.com.
Midge Raymond
I’m happy to announce that Midge Raymond will be teaching two workshops at Claim Your Words.
You can follow Midge at her site. You will also find a link here to her blog where she covers topics related to writing and reading and posts writing prompts. And if you haven’t read her article in the latest issue of Poets & Writers “My Book Is a Year Old, Now What? How to Keep the Buzz Alive”, I recommend it. Here is a link.
Midge Raymond is the author of the story collection Forgetting English, which received the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Originally published by Eastern Washington University Press in 2009, an expanded edition was published by Press 53 in 2011. She is also the author of Everyday Writing: Tips and Prompts to Fit Your Regularly Scheduled Life, and the companion title Everyday Book Marketing. Her award-winning stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications.
Each person has a song….
“Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It 
isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.” ~ Neil Gaiman
Claim Your Story 