Theo Pauline Nestor's Blog, page 10

Bring a Friend for Free to Bird by Bird & Beyond!

(Update 1/12 at NOON:all buy-one-get-one free ticket have been sold. Holiday Discount tickets still available: http://writingismydrink.com/bird-by-bird-and-beyond/).

Readers: I just spent the last 10 minutes looking at images of friends and quotes about friendship. Seriously, I don’t recommend this activity unless you’ve got the time to call up those who’ve stood by you forever and tell them how much I appreciate them. I do not have the time today because I’m busy preparing for Bird by Bird and Beyond, but I thought of you faraway friends (Anika! Paula! Jocelyne! Lauren! Others!), and I do appreciate you madly.

Anyhow! The purpose of this post is to tell you this: The next ten signups for Bird by Bird & Beyond will receive a free admission ticket to give a friend. Or an enemy. Up to you.

I will revise this post when the tenth ticket has been sold, but until then, you can sign up two for the price of one.

Theo

Find Your Writer’s Voice in 2014

Hi Readers,

This post “Find Your Writer’s Voice in 2014″ was really popular on Huffington Post this week, so I thought I’d put it up here on Drink–just in case you missed it. Just 12 days until my event Bird by Bird & Beyond with Anne Lamott in Petaluma. It’s not too late to buy tickets! Hope to see you there!

Theo

 

 

 

Voice is one of those elusive qualities like love or irony that everyone knows the meaning of until it comes time to define it. A sucker for trouble, I just wrote a book about finding my voice–Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (and a Guide to How You Can Too). In the process of writing this book, I spent a lot of time thinking about what voice is, ferreting out where it lives (and where it does not) and figuring out why some of us have to go on a trek to find it. Here’s a short list of what I found out:

1. Leave Your Professional Self at the Office. One reason why voice and personality often do not show up vividly and automatically in the work of emerging writers is that our voices have been beaten out of us in school and in the workplace, both of which have individuality-tamping expectations and norms that regulate both form and content. The scholarly and professional styles that earned you good grades and your way up the ladder won’t win the hearts of readers of fiction or memoir. These readers are looking for the real deal. These readers want the feral you, the wild you that answers to no one.

So how do you leave all you’ve learned about coloring within the lines behind at five o’clock? You might have to do some investigating to see what works for you, but for me one answer has been doing my “real writing” in longhand. Somehow by getting off the computer and back to pen and paper, I’m able to send the message to myself that it’s okay for the real me to come out and play. I can mess with the syntax if I want and voice unpopular opinions. I can start a sentence with “and,” end it with a preposition, and let it run on in a way that would have irritated the hell out of Mr. Dashwood-Jones, my 9th grade English teacher.

2. Find Your Tribe and Gather Them Around You. Another essential step to finding your voice is locating those writers you truly love and immersing yourself in their work. Both steps — the finding and the immersing — involve reading. A lot. Read widely and outside of whatever it is that you believe you are “supposed” to read to be well read, hip, or cultured, and seek the writers who truly excite you. Your list won’t look exactly like anyone else’s. Because of my interests in first person narrative, the feminist, the comic, and probably the prurient, my lifetime list of writers I’ve loved happens to include Woody Allen, Anne Lamott, Erma Bombeck, AND Xaviera Hollander. Unless you and I are actually twins separated at birth, I’m guessing that you won’t happen to have all those writers on your list.

3. Read, read, read. Once you find these writers — your tribe — own them as the writers who are your teachers for the work that you want to do. Read and reread them. Pull chapters apart. Pull paragraphs apart. Ask yourself, “How does she do it?” And then try to create in your own work a technique from one of your writers that delights you — maybe it’s starting a chapter mid-scene or having the characters talk straight to the audience. Following an impulse that you love in another writer takes you very quickly into the heart of you and your voice. What we love points us in the direction we yearn to go.

4. Write, write, write. It’s a cliché of the American sensibility that we want all our desires fulfilled instantly and are petulant when faced with the long haul, but I definitely witness this thinking at play in my writing students and can see how it undermines their progress as writers.

Writing has a long apprenticeship. I’ve heard it said more than once that it usually takes a good decade of earnest effort before your work on the page matches your vision. Settle in for the long haul and do the work. You’re going to write lots and lots of pages that fall short of your expectations for your work, pages that you will — gulp — throw out. That bad work is all part of it, part of the road to finding this thing called your voice. Yes, there will be great stuff here and there all along the way and that’s what keeps you going. But writing is a craft; inspiration comes quickly and mastery comes slowly. Accept this and you’ll be less likely to walk away from the work of revision.

5. Head straight into all that is particular and quirky about you. Finding your voice is about coaxing your essence to show up on the page. Writers we think of as “voicey” don’t sound like anyone but themselves, and they let the aspects of their identity that make them particular — their heritage, their families, their hometown, their obsessions, their predilections, their eccentricities, their syntax — to shine through on the page. You don’t have to have run with the bulls like Hemingway or have grown up in the South like Faulkner. You just have to — like Frank McCourt, like David Sedaris, like Anne Lamott — show us on the page the very you who is like no one else.

Want to learn more about voice in personal narrative? Join me at my event Bird by Bird & Beyond with Anne Lamott in Petaluma, California on January 18th. See WritingIsMyDrink.com for tickets and details.

Find Your Tribe; Find Your Voice.

Miles Davis once said, “Sometimes you have to play for a long time to be able to play like yourself.” And while Davis was talking about music, the very same could be said about writing. Part of what I found most frustrating in my long apprenticeship period as a writer was that not only were my stories and essays not nearly as good on the page as I’d imagined them in my head, they also sounded somehow phony to me. I could hear in my carefully wrought sentences how very hard I was trying—trying not only to be a “good writer,” but also to possess the edginess of Amy Hempel, the existential cool of Lorrie Moore, the authority of Anton Chekhov.

Most new writers are not only voracious readers but passionate ones; the writers they love have inspired them to write and to write well, so it isn’t surprising that the sentence structure, syntax, and cadence of the writers we’ve read so closely should show up on our own pages. We tend to see this as a negative thing, as if we’re mere copycats who do not possess original voices. While in many Asian cultures the artist who most assiduously copies the work of the master is revered, in Western cultures we tend to put a high premium on originality and individual thought. But what if this imitation-is-the-highest-form-of-flattery era of our development were seen not just as a derivative one but as actually essential to finding our own voices?

Maybe we find our own original style not by moving away from the pack but by first fully embracing our community and tradition. By identifying (and yes, copying) the writers we love the most and parsing out what it is in their work that so excites us, we are, in fact, “finding” our own creative vision. During this time, we need to be asking ourselves: What is it that thrills me about Hempel? What could I steal from Moore? How does Chekhov build a story and how could I adopt that technique in my own work?

“Our writers” thrill us partly because we know they are pointing us in the direction we long to go. We each possess a unique set of writers we can identify as our tribe, our teachers from whom we need to study. But after that time of study, we eventually must and can move past the imitative phase and more deeply into our own unique vision. “When I stopped being ambitious about being Alice Munro,” Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestseller Wild, said at the Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat last spring, “I started to become very ambitious about my own writing.”

The apprenticeship period essential to identifying our aesthetic does end. And when it does, we stop comparing ourselves and falling short. We stop feeling like we’re masquerading.

We begin, as Davis said, to play like ourselves.

——————

Try these activities from the chapter “Find Your Tribe; Find Your Voice” from my new book, Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (and a G…:

Write on a big sheet of paper the names of the writers who mean the most to you. Stick this list up on a wall near your workspace.
Invest in purchasing your favorite books and keep a few of these “inner circle” books on your desk as a reminder of who you are and where you’re headed.
Identify books you see as the “ancestors” for the book you want to write. (Early on in creating Writing Is My Drink, I identified three books as its “ancestors”: Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, and Cameron’s The Right to Write. I kept these books on the windowsill beside my desk to remind me of the tradition in which I was writing).
Pick one of your favorite writers and set out to read all of his/her work.  Keep a notebook for your reactions to their work, lines you particularly like, insights into the characteristics of their writing.
Pick a scene or passage from one of your favorite writers and write an imitation of that scene or passage. Using your own content, copy the essence of the passage. If there’s a bit of dialogue followed by description followed by an insight then take your story and create a bit of dialogue followed by some description followed by an insight. It’s a challenging assignment that will teach you a great deal about how the revered writer is actually pulling it off.

Interested in learning more about personal narrative? Come join me at my event Bird by Bird & Beyond with Anne Lamott in Petaluma, CA January 18, 2014. Get a 25 dollar discount on the event registration fee when you enter the promotion code “tribe” upon payment.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/event/8673676199

Event description: Bird by Bird & Beyond with Anne Lamott will be a day focused on building storytelling skills and work strategies for writers and others interested in personal narrative. January 18, 2014 at the Sonoma Sheraton in Petaluma. This event is open to all. No previous writing experience required. Holiday Discount rate tickets: 295 dollars.  Lamott’s keynote talk: “Almost Every Single Thing I Know About Writing.” She’ll share with us not only how she does what she does so well but also “Why writing might be a matter of life and death” and the beloved topics of “messes,” “hysteria,” and “despair.” The talk will be followed by a Q and A book signing. See a complete schedule of the day’s events here.

Happy New Year from Writing Is My Drink!

Hi All,

So many new readers have begun following Writing Is My Drink in the last month that I wanted to post a special welcome to you and to share some Writing Is My Drink news with all you long timers as well.

The blog Writing Is My Drink began in 2010. I wanted to write about writing, but not in a general way. As a memoir writing instructor (for the University of Washington’s Professional and Continuing Education department), I had become very interested in the experience of the emerging writer and the process of finding your voice as a writer. So along with posts that offer writing advice and author interviews, I began writing about my formative experiences as a writer here under the category Theo Finding her Voice.

A year or so later, I had the idea to write a book based on the stories I was writing about in those early posts (taking a class from Frank McCourt, getting over my biggest block ever, to name a few of the experiences). And so Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (And a Guide to How You Can Too) was born and is now–thanks to Simon & Schuster- for sale in bookstores and online. Yay! Writing Is My Drink offers a more in-depth version of my story of coming into myself as a writer and also writing activities designed to help you to discover your own voice. Here’s a link to a new review of the book on Shelf Awareness.

Other resources for new and established readers of Drink:

If you’re new to the blog and to writing, you might want to read the posts in the Emerging Writers’ Series.
Or read my post “Find Your Writer’s Voice in 2014″ on Huffington Post.
Want to read posts from my readers and students? Try the 26-Minute Memoirs or Triptychs.
You might want to listen to this podcast with the faculty of Bird by Bird & Beyond and myself with Linda Joy Meyers of the National Association of Memoir Writers about writing personal narrative:http://lindajoy.audioacrobat.com/download/Birdbybirdfacultypodcast.mp3
You may want to know that I host events for emerging writers that focus on craft,

Theo with Cheryl Strayed at Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat.

community and inspiration such as Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat with Cheryl Strayed and Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive with Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg.
You might even want to come to my event Bird by Bird & Beyond with Anne Lamott (a rare chance to hear her talk to writers about writing) on January 18th in Petaluma, CA. Details here!
Or read my post The Five Things Anne Lamott Taught Me on SheWrites.
You can check out my other upcoming events here.
I hope you will follow me on Facebook.
Or follow me on twitter @theopnestor.

So welcome all you new followers and thank you to all you loyal readers from years gone by, and a happy new year to you all! Let’s have a great year of writing, community, and inspiration in 2014!

Love,

Theo

Emerging Writers’ Series: December News from Theo

Hi Readers,

Yesterday was the highest traffic day Drink has ever had, thanks to a posting about Bird by Bird & Beyond on Anne Lamott’s Facebook page. Speaking of Lamott, She Writes featured my post “Five Things I’ve Learned from Anne Lamott” today.

Lots of folks have been signing up for Bird by Bird & Beyond, which I was thrilled to see topping this list of gift suggestions for writers on Leah Singer’s great blog.

Oh, Goodreads is hosting a giveaway of signed copies the book Writing Is My Drink. Check it out.

Julia Cameron, Theo Nestor, Natalie Goldberg

I just got back from Santa Fe where I had an amazing time last weekend hosting the Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive. Writers from all over the country braved all sorts of weather and travel disasters to converge for this event. Once we got there, Bishop’s Lodge was an idyllic location for the event, complete with glowing farolitos, the smell of pinon in the air, and a roaring fire in the lodge’s kiva fireplace.  One of my favorite moments of the event was when a truck pulled up in the lodge’s snowy driveway (see pic below) and out stepped Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg. It was so fun to have the two of them in conversation together about writing up in front of the crowd and then to have the two of them individually lead the group through writing lessons. Afterwords, many of us congregated around the lodge’s fireplace and talked about what we’d learned from the day. So nice.

Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg

Bishop’s Lodge, Santa Fe

Emerging Writers’ Series: Candace Walsh on Finding Her Way as a Writer

Candace Walsh

Hi Readers,

I’m really happy to be sharing Candace Walsh’s post about her down and out in New York City days as an emerging writer. I met Candace when she was editing the anthology Ask Me About My Divorce and since then we’ve inspired each other in a dozen different ways. I respect her versatility as a writer. She’s written a page-turning memoir (Licking the Spoon) as well as edited and contributed to her own anthologies (Ask Me About My Divorce and Dear John, I Love Jane) and published countless other essays and blog posts. Candace is also a great teacher who is as passionate about the work of her students as she is about her own.

Suzanne Finnamore Luckenbach, Theo, Cheryl Strayed, Candace Walsh at Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat

Candace offers a great example to her students of how to follow your instincts and bring your ideas into fruition, which is why I’m so thrilled that she is on the faculty of both Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive next week in Santa Fe and Bird by Bird & Beyond with Anne Lamott in Petaluma, CA in January.  Interested in joining us in California? Use the promotional code candace when you register for Bird by Bird & Beyond before November 30th at Midnight and you’ll get 40 dollars off the early bird ticket price.

More soon!

Theo

Finding My Way
by Candace Walsh

Living in New York City in the mid-nineties was probably the most painful and perhaps also the most productive place for me to start to become a writer.  I was surrounded by people writing in journals—in coffee shops, in bars, in the park. I felt self-conscious and poseur-ish when I did the same. I had very little to write about, besides my crappy childhood.

I didn’t yet know that if you can write well, you don’t need a riveting, action-packed storyline. Writing well is like playing music well. Your audience is with you, enjoying each note, not wanting that note or word to be the last they hear.

My deepest love, at the time, was poetry. I loved writing it, I loved reading it: quiet, private poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Eileen Myles, Robert Creeley, e.e. cummings, Anne Sexton (I clearly had a thing for poets with lots of e’s in their names). My apartment was just a few blocks from the Nuyorican Poets Café, and I brought a poem there, about an unrequited love that was still tender. I signed up for the Slam, and sat waiting for my turn. I didn’t have a singsongy, embodied delivery, and I definitely didn’t stand up there and do breathy, soft porn undulations like the other women who scored well that night. But afterwards a woman named Anne Elliott, who’d read an amazingly brilliant poem that night, made a point of saying something nice about it to me.

That didn’t mean that I ever went back. I didn’t. There were other discouragements. I started dating this guy, and for the first time, had a domestic relationship where we went to his parent’s or sister’s every weekend. He hung around with St. Marks’ poets in a sycophantic way. He had a friend who, when I said I was a writer, challenged me to recite something that I had written, on the spot, from memory. When I couldn’t, he cackled at me. “Some writer.” My boyfriend mocked me for having a corporate job…while he ate my food and watched my TV, sprung from his parents’ basement. “You don’t even know who the fuck you are,” he said. I was 21. Who does? But they seared into me, those words, both catalyzing and immobilizing me, a foot on the brakes, a foot on the gas. So much energy, but no specific destination in sight.

Thanks to the boyfriend’s sister, though, I got a job at a magazine. I was the office manager, but there were opportunities to write. One editor was receptive, a sweet, soft-spoken guy. The other was smirky, a hot shot with a no-window, precariously messy office and a scratched, faded, red leather Filofax that seemed to be the external beating heart of his career (this was pre-iPhone). I worked with the sweet guy; he gave me my first assignment, which was so tiny that it had a word count of 25. And when I went to Boston to visit a friend, I bought a red leather Filofax when I saw it on sale. It was like a talisman, and I used it for years, filling in addresses, taking notes, saving business cards, and feeling more and more like a writer.

The Filofax didn’t make me a writer, though, nor did the first few published articles in real outlets, like Newsday and Details and Mademoiselle. One part of it was the knowing that had accompanied me since middle school: the desire, the potential.

The other part was the Sitzfleisch, a German word that means the ability to sit still and endure, to face the page, keep writing, push past fear, to write 300 more words when you’re feeling like the brightest, shiniest sentences of the day have already been written. It’s about determination and commitment, it’s not glamorous, and there are no shortcuts. Sure, there are shortcuts to success: luck, because when lots of people play the lottery, one of them always does win. But that terror of not becoming what I was meant to be in life: that did go away, and all of the time I spent with my hands tapping out sentences on various keyboards was worth it.

Black Mesa Main Page

Bird by Bird Main Page

Emerging Writers’ Series: What Louis CK Has to Teach Us

Big thanks to my friend Kellini who turned me on to this video clip last night. Louis CK talking here about his development as a writer and the role George Carlin played in that process illuminates so much of what my guests and I are talking about this month during Drink’s Emerging Writers’ Series.

What I hear in Louis’ story: How very early on (even in childhood) we can identify our mentors as artists, how we often have to go through a long, bleak period of being very crappy at what we long to do very well, and how those we’ve identified as mentors can model ways to solve our craft and process problems.

As a writer of memoir, I continue to be fascinated by what stand-up comics (Margaret Cho, Louis CK, George Carlin, to name a few) and solo performers (Spalding Gray, Mike Daisey, Tanya Taylor Rubinstein) can teach us about the art of telling our stories.

More soon!

Theo

P.S. I’ll be hosting an event with one of the writers I long ago identified as a mentor on January 18th in Petaluma, CA: Bird by Bird & Beyond with Anne Lamott. Until November 16th at Midnight get 40 bucks off the early bird price when you enter the promotional code: mentor. Buy tickets here.

Photo: Mark Richards

 

 

Emerging Writers’ Series: Guest Post from Tanya Taylor Rubinstein

Hi Readers,

Tanya Taylor Rubinstein

I’m thrilled that we have Tanya Taylor Rubinstein here today to talk about her path from emerging to established writer. Tanya Taylor Rubinstein has found her niche as a personal storyteller in the genre of solo performance. As a teacher, she is known worldwide as “the solo performance coach,” helping writers to develop their personal narratives into shows produced on stages everywhere. I think writers in every genre of personal narrative can learn so much from the storytelling strategies used in solo performance in general and Tanya in particular, and so I am thrilled that Tanya will be on the faculty of both Bird by Bird & Beyond with Anne Lamott and Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive.

Check out her story below!

Theo

Claiming My Path as a Solo Performer
by Tanya Taylor Rubinstein

I remember putting pencil or crayon to paper and the sweet relief I found from my own sense of isolation that seems to have followed me into this lifetime: a deep aloneness that I have never really shaken. For me, writing was about expression and connection right from the start. I would wake up early and write my mom a poem and slip it under the door before breakfast to surprise her.

It was sacred, it was a gift, it was an offering.

Some of my earliest memories are of writing. My mother, who was an elementary school teacher, taught me to read and write before I went to kindergarten.

She always tells me, that as soon as I could string two words together, I was obsessed with writing stories and poems. Forty plus years later, she still has some of my early attempts at storytelling as evidence. She has an upstairs drawer in a guest bedroom filled with little scraps of construction paper with my seven and eight word tales written on them.

By the time I was fifteen, I was ensconced in the world of theater. There was rarely a time when I was not in rehearsal for a show, both in and out of school. Theater became the defining center of who I was. It had already sheltered me through the death of a beloved grandfather. Early on I noted its emotionally transformative powers. It was a lifeline in an otherwise drab suburban landscape.

I went on to study theater professionally in college and at an acting studio in NYC.By the time I was in my twenties, I was becoming disillusioned with the offerings of the conventional American theater. I went to see “The Heidi Chronicles” by Wendy Wasserstein on Broadway. And though the character of Heidi was being touted as an archetype of the contemporary woman, I found very little to relate to in her high strung, over privileged neurosis. Then, I was cast in the second production in the U.S. of The Kentucky Cycle. It was an ensemble piece that explored the coal-mining communities of Kentucky through several generations. All the actors played multiple roles in the six hour production that played over two days for audiences.

Though undeniably brilliant, the play did not resonate with me or the issues I wanted to explore in theater. The female characters were all secondary to the men’s roles and although the play had just won The Pulitzer Prize, it did not speak to my heart and soul. And, as I had just devoted a year of my life to this show; that in and of itself was the beginning of a wake-up call for me.

My heart continued to return to an experience I had, in a small theater, when I was nineteen years old and studying acting in Boston. That was when I had seen Spalding Gray perform one of his early monologues. He sat on a stage and shared parts of his life with us that evening. It was fresh, it was raw; it was simple and it was honest. Above all, it gave me the feeling of connection that I so craved, even as a small child. He offered his humanity, even the embarrassing parts, as a way to create a feeling of intimacy. There was none of the artifice that hangs around most all traditional theater. I had carried the dream since I saw him perform and met him afterwards, that the personal monologue format he shared, was what I wanted to do, more than anything else in my life. And, I had no idea how I could possibly do it.

As I began to seriously contemplate turning the dream into a reality, some very basic questions emerged. How could I write my own shows when I didn’t write? And, how would I find the courage to stand onstage alone and offer myself to an audience? I figured that I would deal with the first issue first.

By this time, I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our small town is a hot-bed of creativity and turned out to be the perfect place for me to find my writing voice. One night, I was invited to a small coffee shop/bookstore for a reading of an author from Taos who had a new book out on creativity. The book was “The Artist’s Way” and the author was Julia Cameron. I bought the book and the journey was formally underway.

The next four years were devoted to daily writing. I wrote morning page. I wrote in my journal. I wrote poetry and read at poetry readings around town and in Taos. And, I began to write monologues.

During this same period of time, a local producer began to bring in solo performers from NYC to Santa Fe for shows (thank you Kol Heggerty!).. I saw John Leguizamo in “Mambo Mouth,” Anna Deavere Smith in “Fires in the Mirror,” Reno, Karen Finley and several more shows by Spalding Gray. It was as if I designed my own graduate studies program in solo performance and I was immersing myself in the curriculum. I might add that this was all happening in the early 90s and there were no official grad programs in solo theater, unlike the ones that are offered now.

I also immersed myself in other experiences that supported this path. I read Anne Lamott and May Sarton. I went to see Ntozake Shange, Simon Ortiz and Judyth Hill read their poetry. All of these people were exploring, in their own ways, intimacy. On the page and on the stage.

The other thing that was important in this mix was going to therapy and dealing with some emotional issues that had haunted me and blocked my full expression for much of my life. These parts of myself wanted to keep me smaller than I am and needed to be addressed if I was ever to realize my dreams of performing my own material. I think, that as creative beings, we all deserve to explore where we come from to truly discover what it is we most essentially need to say.  Also, for many of us, therapy or other forms of healing can be critically important when it comes to taking the brave steps required to offer our work to the world.

So, in 1994, between writing my own material and integrating my understanding of various structures, I wrote my first show. I was referred to a director, Wendy Chapin, who had a good instincts about what worked and what did not onstage. She challenged me constantly to write and rewrite for which I am now very thankful.

She understood the parts of the script that needed to be either deleted or transformed. Many of these passages were personally healing for me, but could be potentially seen as self-indulgent to an audience.

This is where the importance of voice and expanding my voice became the next step for me that was necessary in my process. It turned my personal material into something stage-worthy. I now see the same process happen or not happen with all of my coaching clients. And, when it happens, this is when we have a worthy public offering. Before this, it is still essentially a personal process.

Understanding this difference is part of moving from novice to professional is. For me, point of view or voice in its truest sense is where we marry our creativity, imagination, sense of humor and/or wisdom with our personal stories. It is where we have the opportunity to rise, for ourselves and others, to view our humanity with a bit more inspiration and levity.

In this place, we can fully claim ourselves as an artist.

Here’s the good news and the bad news. The good news is that this work of finding our voices, claiming our unique point of view, writing memoir, performing solo shows, facilitating others and all the other wondrous twists and turns our own paths can lead us into deeply satisfying, rich work of a life-time. For me and for many others I know, it is a joy, a devotion and a blessed, beyond dream come true.

And here is the bad news: There are no short-cuts in this work. There are many, many stages we each need to go through to claim ourselves in this intimate and powerful way. Your path may include many classes and workshops; it may include daily writing practice for one year or ten before you are ready to throw your hat into the proverbial ring, it may include acting lessons, it may include meditating and cutting out drinking or sugar. It may include watching every solo performance on Netflix you can get your hands on.

And then, there is the one illusive variable that separates those who end up having a creative career that moves past personal expression to one that is an offering to humanity. It’s called “Your Consciousness.” It cannot be duplicated and cannot be faked. It will show in your writing and in your presence. All the work put together plus your own earnestness and goodness of spirit must be included in this one thing for your life to truly soar. I have no hard and fast rules for you to follow to take ownership of this illusive, yet overarching energy. But I do know that it is absolutely essential to the soup. It is the secret ingredient. Only you can uncover it—and when you do—you will have a sublime and invaluable gift to share with us all.

 

Black Mesa Main Page

Bird by Bird Main Page

News for Emerging Writers November, 2013

Good Morning, Readers,

Leanne Goebel, Recipient Natalie Goldberg/NAMW Scholarship

First, a big congratulations to Leanne Goebel who was chosen by the National Association of Memoir Writers to be the recipient of the Natalie Goldberg/NAMW Scholarship to Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive. The cost of her registration fees will be covered by the scholarship generously funded by an anonymous donor. Thank you, Anonymous!

A few spots are still open for the Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive with Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg in Santa Fe on December 6th, a day of intensive exploration into the craft of personal narrative. Open to both writers of all levels of experience. Classes with Cameron, Goldberg, Nestor, Walsh, and Taylor Rubinstein. For more info and ticket info, click here.

Speaking of the National Association of Memoir Writers, NAMW is offering a free teleseminar today. Go here for all the details. The teleseminar is being recorded so sign up even if you can’t attend the event live.

Photo: Mark Richards

Ticket sales are underway for Bird by Bird & Beyond with Anne Lamott in Petaluma, California on January 18, 2014.  Just the first one hundred tickets will be sold at the early bird price. Bonus for Drink readers: Receive an additional 40 dollars off the early bird price between now and November 13th at Midnight when you enter this promotional code: writingismydrink. More info and registration here.

Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (and a Guide to How You Can Too) hit bookstores this week. If you read the book, please consider writing a review on Amazon and Goodreads.

I’m doing a blog tour to promote the book, writing posts especially for emerging writers including this one on finding your tribe and your voice on She Writes and this one on vulnerability on the Memoir Project.

In real life, I’ll be teaching free memoir writing classes in Seattle, Marin County, Portland and Santa Fe. Check out all my events here.

If you come to one of my events, please introduce yourself. I want to meet you.

More soon!

Theo

Emerging Writers Series: Natalie Goldberg/NAMW Scholarship for Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive

Black Mesa Main Page

Hi Readers,

By the time I finally got into a writing program, I was 36, but my apprenticeship as a writer had begun a decade earlier, the beginnings of which are only clear to me now in retrospect. Back in my 20s and early 30s, it did not occur to me that my path as a writer had begun in my excited conversations with other waitresses who also possessed literary ambitions and during the nights I spent sitting cross-legged on the floor of a poet’s trailer in the middle of the desert earnestly scribbling. Nor did I realize that I’d begun an informal training with a workshop here and there and with my self-directed reading program of short story and essay collections.

“I had no idea where to begin the career trajectory that goes from waitress to writer,” I say of this time in Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (And a Guide to How You Can Too).  Many can relate to this, I know, and within that group, there are many who don’t have the means to attend workshops and seminars that might provide exposure to writing mentors.  So it is with great pleasure that I announce the Natalie Goldberg/NAMW Scholarship for the Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive at Bishop’s Lodge in Santa Fe on December 6, 2013. 

Please find all the details below and share this post with friends. Do note that the deadline is soon: Saturday, November 2nd at Midnight PST.

Exciting!

Theo

The Natalie Goldberg/NAMW Scholarship for Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive

 An anonymous donation has provided a full-tuition scholarship for the Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive at Bishop’s Lodge in Santa Fe, New Mexico on December 6, 2013. Honoring Natalie Goldberg’s contribution as a teacher to the greater writing community, the Natalie Goldberg/NAMW Writer’s Scholarship will go to a person of financial need with a desire to learn about the art of personal narrative.

 To apply: Send a letter of no more than 500 words about your interest in personal narrative and your reasons for wanting to attend the Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive by November 2, 2013 at Midnight with a copy of the top page of your 2012 tax return to lindajoy@namw.org. The recipient will be announced on November 6th on WritingIsMyDrink.com. See below for the fine print.

Hosted by author Theo Pauline Nestor, the Black Mesa Writers’ Intensive is a one-day exploration into the craft and possibilities of personal narrative at Bishop’s Lodge in Santa Fe, New Mexico on Dec. 6th. Faculty: Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way), Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones), Tanya Taylor Rubinstein, Candace Walsh, and Theo Pauline Nestor. Regular price tickets: $275. $325 at the door. See full schedule of events and register at http://writingismydrink.com/black-mesa-writers-intensive/. Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blackmesawriters.

 The National Association of Memoir Writers is cosponsoring this scholarship and will be solely responsible for the selection of the recipient. The National Association of Memoir Writers supports memoir writers in the quest to write, publish, and market their memoir. NAMW believes in the power of memoir and helps to create a national and international  community of memoir writers. Please visit our site to learn about the many benefits of being a member of NAMW.

The fine print: Scholarship recipients are responsible for their travel to and from Black Mesa and their lodging in Santa Fe. Lunch at Black Mesa is included. Recipient’s social security number should be blacked out or cut out of top page of return included with application. All information disclosed in application will be kept confidential. The scholarship is in Natalie Goldberg’s name only; she is not involved in the financing or selection process of the scholarship.

Check out Bird by Bird & Beyond with Anne Lamott!