Claim Your Story

Writing Conference, Ashland, Oregon

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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

 

 


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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 Melissa HartConference. 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.

 

 


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Midge Raymond

MidgeRaymond-photoI’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.

 


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Each person has a song….

“Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It bird singingisn’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


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Claim Your Story 2014

Please mark your calendars for  Claim Your Story 2014.

Image by Billy Tice, Austin, TX

Image by Billy Tice, Austin, Texas

          Saturday, October 4

     It will once again be held at the charming Lithia Springs Resort in Ashland, Oregon.

The schedule will be posted here soon along with ongoing writing inspiration so please check back.


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The History of Poetry
Our masters are gone and if they returned
Who among us would hear them, who would know
The bodily sound of heaven of the heavenly sound
Of the body, endless and vanishing, that tuned
Our days before the wheeling stars
Were stripped of power? The answer is
None of us here. And what does it mean if we see
The moon-glazed mountains and the town with its silent doors
And water towers, and feel like raising our voices
Just a little, or sometimes during late autumn
When the evening flowers a moment over the western range
And we imagine angels rushing down the air’s cold steps
To wish us well, if we have lost our will,
And do nothing but doze, half hearing the sighs
Of this or that breeze drift aimlessly over the failed farms
And wasted gardens? These days when we waken.
Everything shines with the same blue light
That filled our sleep moments before,
So we do nothing but count the trees, the clouds,
The few birds left; then we decide that we shouldn’t
Be hard on ourselves, that the past was no better
Than now, for hasn’t the enemy always existed,
And wasn’t the church of the world always in ruins?
 – Mark Strand