April Henry appears Sunday, October 11^th at 2 P.M. on the Target Children’s Stage.

I used to write books just for me.  No publisher was waiting for them.  And they were done when they were done. 

Now I’m writing most of my books – I’ll have six out in three years – under contract, which means they have a due date.  (Although I still sneak off to a “spec” book now and then, like a married woman making out with some guy in the parking lot of her gym.)

 Now my writing process is like this:

* One year before the book is due:  I have plenty of time.  And I deserve to relax after how hard I worked to get the last book done. I think I’ll clean out the basement.

★ Nine months before.  This plot idea seems good.  Maybe I should create a thorough outline.  After I finish alphabetizing the spices.

Read more »

Dawn Prochovnic will be reading one of her stories, THE NEST WHERE I LIKE TO REST, from “Story Time with Signs & Rhymes” series at 11:00 AM on Saturday, October 10^th on the Target Children’s Stage.

One of the most common questions I’m asked by other writers is, “How did you get published?” Here is the story behind the story.

About ten years ago I started SmallTalk Learning, a company that specializes in teaching sign language workshops for parents and caregivers of hearing infants and toddlers (aimed at helping babies communicate before they can talk).  I discovered early on that the most effective way to help people learn and remember particular signs was to teach them catchy songs they could sing and sign while they interacted with their babies.  I wrote all kinds of ditties for this purpose, modeled after familiar children’s songs and rhymes like “Old MacDonald Has a Farm” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”    

After awhile I discovered that preschoolers and elementary school children were also interested in learning sign language, and I developed an interest in expanding my reach beyond that which I could manage in my own classes.  I wanted to share the joyful experience of signing with children and their grown-ups across the miles and decided the best way to do that would be to publish a handful of my songs in the form of picture book stories.  So, I put out word to my network of friends and professional associates that I was looking for an illustrator and a publisher to help me get my books out into the world.  And then I discovered that’s simply not how it’s done.

Read more »

Kathleen Kent, author of The Heretic’s Daughter, is teaching a Wordstock for Writers workshop entitled “Witch’s Brew: Combining Fact, Fiction and Family History” Saturday at 3:00 p.m. and is appearing Sunday at 11:00 a.m. on the Beyond Words Stage.

I was on the runway to fifty before I even started my first novel. My passion in college had been writing, my early attempts fueled in particular by colonial American history; but I was doubtful I could earn a living at it. I also wanted to see the world, to escape from the small town Texas life where I grew up, and to do that, (and eat, pay for electricity and running water) I needed a steady income.

After college, I lived and worked in New York City for twenty years, building a career in the commercial marketplace; first, in commodities as the operations manager for the former chairman of Comex, and then for an American company doing defense conversion work for the U.S. Department of Defense in the former Soviet Union.  I was a contract liaison for almost eight years to the Defense Department, reporting the slow, and often frustrating, progress of converting military plants to civilian use. Needless to say, the U.S. government as a rule frowns on creative writing where contract reportage is concerned—mostly—and so I had to be content with writing short stories for my own pleasure. I had many hours in flight to such places as Kazakhstan and Belarus, and I often filled the time with keeping a journal that I carried with me everywhere.

Read more »

That’s right, we’re giving away 12 Free One-Day Tickets to the Wordstock Book Festival. All you have to do is write a Haiku. It’s that simple.

Starting Monday Morning (9/28) at 8am and running until Friday (10/2) at Midnight, if you Twitter a Haiku about Wordstock, Wordstock Authors, or any one of our partner events you will be entered into the contest.

Every Haiku should follow the normal guidelines. One line of 5 syllables, One line of 7 syllables, followed by another line of 5 syllables. Each line should be seperated by a “/” mark just to be safe, since Twitter usually squishes entries. Plus you need to add the following at the end: “#WSHaiku” and “@wordstockfest” It should all fit in 140 Characters.

Example Tweet:

Wordstockfest: “Wordstock is Awesome/ You know that you want to go/ Join us October #WSHaiku @wordstockfest”

You can write as many as you like. And as long as you format them like the above example, we’ll find them and include them in the contest.

But that’s not all. Saturday 10/3 – Wordstock will read all the entries and post the 20 finalists on our Facebook Page. Then the voting begins. The top two vote getters will get a pair of tickets each while the next 8 runners up will get one ticket each.

1st and 2nd place: 2 Tickets

3rd-10th – 1 Ticket

So get those typing fingers warmed up and start posting Wordstock Haikus tomorrow morning at 8am.

May the best Haiku win! Or the best ten!

Melissa Hart appears Saturday at 12 noon on the University of Oregon Nonfiction Stage, and she is teaching a Wordstock for Writers workshop Saturday from 3:00-4:15 p.m. entitled “Writing Short Memoir That Sells”.

A while back, I complained on my Facebook fan page for Gringa about my summer struggles to make a book trailer. One of my gringa_smallfriends e-mailed back, “Wouldn’t it be easier if you just searched on Craigslist for a used Library Bookmobile and called it good?”

Tempting as it was to simply pack our VW bus with copies of the book and hit the road, I nevertheless slaved away for two months learning Final Cut Express so that I could create a 3 1/2 minute book trailer to promote Gringa. A book trailer functions like a movie trailer–both are short and compelling, with the goal of selling a product. More and more authors are making book trailers, or having them made. Here’s a good article from Poets & Writers Magazine which explains further. You can also watch numerous trailers here.

Read more »

Jerome Gold, author of  Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility, appears on Saturday, October 10 at 11 a.m. on the Wieden + Kennedy Stage.

My book, Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility, is a memoir, in journal form, of my years as a counselor in a prison for children in Washington state. I think a lot of people envision my job as one in which the kids—“residents,” we called them, or just “kids”—would go to an office away from the daily hullabaloo and meet with me. It wasn’t that way. Most of my job consisted of monitoring and interacting with kids in their living unit.

Each counselor had assigned to him or her one or more kids, but he/she was expected to get to know all the kids in the unit. I usually had from two to five kids on my caseload, in a living unit (we called them “cottages”) that was populated by 16 to 23 kids. (Cottages then were built to house 16, so 23 was overcrowding. In the past few years, cottages have been renovated so that they are more prisonlike—much more concrete and metal than wood cloth—and hold more kids.) I worked for several years in a cottage for older boys, then for several years in maximum security, which was co-ed. I “specialized” in kids who had committed violent crimes, though I was also case manager for other kids—car thieves, burglars, sex offenders.

Read more »

Stacey Lynn Brown, author of Cradle Song, appears at 11 A.M. on Sunday, October 11, on the Mountain Writer’s Stage.

I was born and raised in the South, and I stayed there through college, attending Emory University in Atlanta as an undergrad. But when it came time for me to look at graduate schools, I knew that I needed to leave in order to gain some perspective.  After all, the inside of a place only affords you one view, and I knew I wanted to see what other parts of the country were like—and what the South looked like from the outside.

I was fortunate enough to have a few options when it came to getting my MFA. My choice? The University of Oregon. Oh, there was New York, with its unlimited cultural opportunities.  And there was the Midwest, with its “granddaddy of them all” writing program. But once I flew across the Rockies and landed in Oregon to check it out, I knew: this was the place where I could write.  This was the place where I could find out what it was that I had to say.

My father often says that he didn’t know at the time what a sad day it was when he helped me pack that U-Haul and watched me drive away, bound for what we all thought was just a two-year stint in the West. But once I found my place in Oregon, I didn’t want to leave. And so I stayed. For twelve years.

I have to admit that I fell in love with the landscape first. I’d simply never seen so many variations on the color green. Or the way the light moved almost horizontally through cloud breaks on an autumn day. The hot springs and waterfalls, giant ferns and nursery logs in the old-growth forests I hiked through. The lushness of the evergreens beneath the misting winter rain.  Over time, the upward pointing arrows of Douglas firs replaced my long-loved Georgia pines.  And though I missed lightning bugs and the sudden violence of thunderstorms, there wasn’t much else I missed in my new home.

Read more »

Sarah Rees Brennan appears at 3 P.M. on Saturday October 10th on the Target Children’s Stage.

Mixing the Truth in Your Fiction

I often hear people being worried that they’ll offend if they put real-life people in their books. Sometimes a person will inspire someone to create a character: sometimes a person will be so horrible that writers are subjected to an irresistible temptation to put them into their books and torture them. Or at least do something embarrassing to them involving cream pies.

My advice to anyone who wants to put a real person, or a real life event, in their story? Go for it! I promise you: nobody will notice. Stories and the things living inside stories change as you write them, change so you’re writing about something entirely different, going through a crucible or an ocean, coming out rich and strange. Read more »

Brian Christopher will read from So Many Things That Want To Burn on Sunday, October 11 at 5 P.M. on the McMenamins Stage.

Writing should be extreme. It should absolve or condemn. It has the power to create or destroy, and it should not be passive. It should give birth or kill, or at least draw blood. But it has to be clandestine; its motives should be shrouded. You have to be made blind, like falling in love, to be deceived by such illusions. We all want, secretly, to be wounded in this way—a way we cannot buy ourselves into, but it’s difficult to cut your own wrists or run onto a blade. We have to be lulled, tricked. It’s hard to trust a writer who shows you the knife too soon. There should be a bribe for the eyes, a flash of something shiny as hint, then, suddenly, open flesh and scarlet spreading. The writer should decoy like a magician who waves his left hand ornately in the air—a magnet to vision—while his right slips the dove from his sleeve. We say we hate surprises, but we are desperate to be fooled. Afraid to be touched until a lover’s caress lures some kind of heaven along our spine. These conundrums suggest a kind of madness is at play.

But we are hardly helpless. Through language the world is made, laid to waste, and made again—rising from the ashes and the rubble, phoenix-like, to go again in search of fire—creating chaos from order before plunging back into the breach. It is the most powerful tool we hold.

Instinctively, we seek knowledge and experience, but we fear these things when face to face with the abyss of their transformation, the sheer darkness of their proclivity for change, their unknown foreboding. But the writer should force us to be brave by cornering us between a stone and the ledge before we have a chance to run, so that leaping is the only choice left. Only then do we  become strong enough to find the inherent courage to actively destroy and recreate ourselves, ready at any moment to lay our flesh against the razor or build a fortress on the faultline—craving scars, anxious for the fissure to open and threaten to swallow us whole.

Where is all this leading? It is academic; the gift is in the process, not the goal. Inevitably, to a place without laws or leaders, where the past falls away like molting skin and the future never forms, the moment only a flower unfolding in an endless cycle of decay and bloom, beautiful as the gasped-for breath stolen by a sucker-punch to the gut or the sudden loss of altitude as the plane descends. But, alas, I do not aspire to be Icarus here, waxing with feathered words to fashion wings with my eyes on the Sun. I know this definition, for all its acrobatics and arching, cannot escape the tower prison. It can only dream and die and settle for the ocean when it longs for the sky. Again, these words—these wines and weapons—are all I have. They may intoxicate, inspire, or incite to action, or they may fail to engage. But to me there are no alternatives; I am ready to fly or fall. Inertia is the only sin. I am at the edge, and all I can do is jump.

Michael Rosen appears Saturday, October 10th at 11 A.M. on the Wieden+Kennedy Stage.

I’m drowning in an ethics of family.  Okay, not quite. I am claustrophobic, disappointed, sometimes angry, perhaps too often prideful these days with some of our sons.

We’ve raised an extended family of seven boys, starting by adopting our sons Ripton then Morgan.  Each was named for a Vermont town, the state where I grew up.

My wife and I live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an urban place with the feel of community. Our sons’ names may come from my pastoral yearning. Robert Frost, Vermont’s state poet and sage, lived and wrote in the village of Ripton. I named my recent book about our extended family (What Else But Home: Seven Boys and an American Journey Between the Projects and the Penthouse) from his The Death of the Hired Man. Perhaps from your schooling, the hired hand Silas has returned to the couple’s home whose farm he’s worked, abandoned, worked, abandoned. “Off he goes always when I need him most,” Warren the husband complains to his wife Mary.  He’ll not have Silas back. 

Read more »