Presented by Mid-Valley Willamette Writers

Saturday, 9 January 2016, 1:00-3:00 pm

Stellaria Community Rooms, 150 Shelton McMurphy Drive

$30 members/$45 nonmembers

email Midvalleyww@gmail.com to register

You carry every moment you have ever lived deep in the cells of your body. Your mind may have forgotten an experience, but your body holds it and carries it forward.

You can draw on your body’s wisdom to deepen and enrich your writing. When you write from your body you can:

• Make your characters more complex and fully realized
• Move your plot forward with authentic actions that come from your character’s inner needs and unconscious motivations
• Find the “just right” words to capture a scene or situation
• Find metaphors that create the emotional context that will give your story its deepest meanings

This workshop will consist of a number of writing exercises that will help you get in touch with and write from your body’s store of experience, drawing on the deep meaning and significance that come directly from that experience.

 

Anna Willman grew up in the Midwest. As an adult she has lived in the South and on both the East and West coasts. She also lived in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, for a year and a half as a Fulbright Scholar. She has two Master’s degrees in political science. She has had a varied career that has included working as a letter carrier, as a personal care assistant for a woman with disabilities, as the director of a community housing organization in New York City’s Lower East Side, as a library assistant, and as a secretary for a team of architects.

She retired in 2008 after working for fourteen years as director of the Confidence Clinic, a community wellness program for women in Roseburg, Oregon. She has written extensively about that program’s history, philosophy, and practice. Since her retirement, she has also published five novels: three Regency romances, and two literary novels.