Willamette Writers Eugene Presents Finding Your Vision, Finding Your Voice

with Gina Ochsner

A generative, hands-on session for essayists, fiction writers, and prose poets of all experience levels. Explore a variety of out-of-the-box methods to generate and develop ideas and material that reflect your unique experiences, imagination, and voice. We’ll talk about how to cultivate ideas into essays, stories, or poem starts. Next, we’ll discuss how to develop our starts into material that bristles with complexity, conflict, image, and voice. Finally, we’ll talk about what happens when our terrific ideas and material seem to lose their sizzle. For example, we may have a terrific start and then discover that we feel stuck or blocked. We’ll examine unsticking strategies and how to push through being blocked.

Your key takeaways from this presentation: Ways to generate story, essay, or poem ideas How to shape and cultivate material in order to find your unique voice and vision How to break through being blocked or stuck with a writing project

Join the Eugene chapter of Willamette Writers on Tuesday, April 25 from 6-7:45 pm in partnership with the Eugene Public Library.

This event is free and open to the public, available in-person at Downtown Eugene Public Library, 100 W 10th Ave, and online. Please read Zoom details below before you register in advance online at: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0oce-trDwuGdHzhu5zDETswXqBsWrB8cyJ.

Gina Ochsner (she/her) teaches writing and literature at Corban University and is on faculty with Seattle Pacific’s Low Residency M.F.A program.

She’s the author of the short story collection The Necessary Grace to Fall, which was selected for the Flannery O’Connor Award, and the collection People I Wanted to Be. Both collections received the Oregon Book Award. Her novels include The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight and The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

Ochsner has been awarded the Raymond Carver Prize, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, The Faulkner Award, and the Kurt Vonnegut Prize. Her work has also been published in The Kenyon Review, Image: Journal of Art , Faith and Mystery, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker.

Ochsner is at work on another collection of magic realism/fantasy/speculative stories entitled A Shadow Curled Around Your Heart. To find out more about her, visit www.ginaochsner.com.

About your chapter meetings

Willamette Writers meetings are open to all writers, 18 and up. Guests are welcome to make a donation to help support the cost of the meeting (we believe in paying our speakers for their time and skills). This meeting is run by volunteers. We look forward to seeing you there!

Young writers are encouraged to join our Young Willamette Writers meetings. Sign Up! Any high school or middle-grade writers are welcome to join us. Sign up for our email list at: http://eepurl.com/hRubBf  A registration link will be sent to our email list before our next meeting.

MASKING: Willamette Writers continues to require mask-wearing at our in-person, indoor meetings. If you are unable to mask, we invite you to join us at one of our online Chapter Meetings. Here is a link to our policies.

Zoom Details

You have to be logged into your own personal Zoom account to attend this meeting (to create a FREE account, go to Zoom.us).

Once you are logged in to your own personal zoom account, register for the meeting in the link provided above.

On the day of the meeting, log into your Zoom account and then click the link zoom sent you in your email when you registered with the link above. If you are logged into your personal zoom account, you can also click the link above and register again if you need to. If you have not done this before, we encourage you to try logging in a half hour before the meeting begins. We had to change our meeting access because of a few inappropriate guests, but we want to continue to keep our meetings open to the public.