Sophfronia Scott's Blog: Sophfronia Scott, Author, page 18

Addressing Current Events

When it’s been a tough week with a lot of dreadful news, don’t stay in bed and hide under the covers! This is exactly the time when you need to write. For this Morning Walk video, here’s why with some inspiration from the late Toni Morrison.

If you’re reading this post via email and don’t see the video, you can view it by using this link to go directly to my YouTube channel.

A few reminders: The book I wrote with my son Tain, This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World,  is now available as an audiobook from Audible. Tain and I recorded it together and I hope we’ll get to accompany you on a long drive some day soon!

We’re now enrolling the Second Edition of my Write of Your Life Writers’ Retreat. We’ll be in the Veneto Region of Italy September 20-26 and I would be thrilled if you would join us! View the beautiful full color brochure here. If you’d like your own print version just email me with your postal address.

Take care, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Yours,

Sophfronia

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The Ten Essentials for Changing Your Writing Life

How are you doing with the goals and resolutions you made in January for your writing life? Is it anything like this New Yorker cartoon I received in my social media multiple times in January? It’s funny because it’s true. My response? If you’re really going to get any writing done, focus on the essentials. If you want real change in anything–writing, work, relationships–you have to have the foundational elements to support what you’re trying to do. I’ve identified The Ten Essentials for Changing Your Writing Life and I shared them in a series of brief messages sent via email and social media in January. Did you miss out? I’ll repost them here on my blog throughout March. As you read them let me know if you have questions about implementing the essentials for yourself. And, of course, I hope you enjoy them!

Yours,

Sophfronia



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On Holding Both Loss and Joy

A Morning Walk video about taking stock for the new year. You’ll want to honor both the light and the dark in your life. Here’s how.

Video includes shout outs to Kim Nalley, Joy Harjo, Taylor Brorby, Rachel Fox, Terry Tempest Williams, Andrew Simmonds, and FX Networks‘ A Christmas Carol.

If you’re reading this post via email and don’t see the video, you can view it by using this link to go directly to my YouTube channel.

A few reminders: The book I wrote with my son Tain, This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World,  is now available as an audiobook from Audible. Tain and I recorded it together and I hope we’ll get to accompany you on a long drive some day soon!

We’re now enrolling the Second Edition of my Write of Your Life Writers’ Retreat. We’ll be in the Veneto Region of Italy September 20-26 and I would be thrilled if you would join us! View the beautiful full color brochure here. If you’d like your own print version just email me with your postal address.

Take care, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Yours,

Sophfronia

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A Gift of Silence

I didn’t get to post this here in December. It’s a walk I recorded in the Kentucky woods near the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani.  It’s meant to be a quiet gift before the swirl of the holidays but I think we could all use a bit of silence anytime. Enjoy. xoxo

If you’re reading this post via email and don’t see the video, you can view it by using this link to go directly to my YouTube channel.

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On Being Present

For this morning’s walk I’m in an airport, on my way to Kentucky, and thinking about writing and being a part of hard conversations instead of avoiding them. FYI, the essay I mention in the video is called “A Quiet Truth” and you can read it at Ruminate Magazine.

A few reminders: The book I wrote with my son Tain, This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World,  is now available as an audiobook from Audible. Tain and I recorded it together and I hope we’ll get to accompany you on a long drive some day soon!

We’re now enrolling the Second Edition of my Write of Your Life Writers’ Retreat. We’ll be in the Veneto Region of Italy September 20-26 and I would be thrilled if you would join us! View the beautiful full color brochure here. If you’d like your own print version just email me with your postal address.

Take care, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Yours,

Sophfronia

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On Writing Change

Yes, that infamous Peloton ad was strange but its quirks offer a big takeaway to consider for your writing and for your life. For this morning’s walk, how change shows up on the page.

A few reminders: The book I wrote with my son Tain, This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World,  is now available as an audiobook from Audible. Tain and I recorded it together and I hope we’ll get to accompany you on a long drive some day soon!

We’re now enrolling the Second Edition of my Write of Your Life Writers’ Retreat. We’ll be in the Veneto Region of Italy September 20-26 and I would be thrilled if you would join us! View the beautiful full color brochure here. If you’d like your own print version just email me with your postal address.

Take care, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Yours,

Sophfronia

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State Artist Grant Awarded to Sandy Hook Writer

As published in The Newtown Bee, February 14, 2020.

Local author Sophfronia Scott has been awarded an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Office of the Arts.

The Sandy Hook resident was listed this week among 51 writers, musicians, and visual artists receiving funds totaling $149,000. The Artist Fellowship Program provides competitive grants to encourage the continuing development of Connecticut artists.

“I’m absolutely thrilled,” said Ms Scott. “There’s a ton of talented artists living in Connecticut so the competition for these grants is tough. I’m honored the Office of the Arts saw fit to recognize and support my writing.”

The Office of the Arts, as noted on the ct.gov site, is the state agency charged with fostering the health of Connecticut’s creative economy. Part of the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development, the Office of the Arts is funded by the state of Connecticut as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. The Artist Fellowship Grants are awarded annually.

Ms Scott’s grant will help fund her current writing project, a nonfiction book tentatively titled The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton, about the famous Trappist monk and author of The Seven Storey Mountain who died in 1968.

In her fellowship application, Scott wrote that the project “documents my engagement with the writing, specifically the personal journals, of the monk Thomas Merton as I meditate on issues both personal and social. In the fifty years since his death Merton has been placed on a pedestal with the titles of ‘prophet’ and ‘mystic.’ But in culling through his journals, which he began as a young man, I have found a very human kindred spirit who, like all of us, struggled with faith, ambition, race, politics, materialism, environmentalism, and even love.”

The book is slated for publication in the spring of 2021 by Broadleaf Books, a new publishing imprint recently launched by the Minnesota multimedia company 1517 Media. According to its website, Broadleaf Books “is committed to expanding the mind, nourishing the soul, cultivating the common good. Our books inspire transformation in readers and their communities to foster a more open, just and compassionate world.  Rooted in the progressive Christian tradition and reflecting the diversity of human creativity, we publish books that engage readers in fresh, substantive, timely and inspiring reflection on what it is to live with meaning and connection.”

Ms Scott moved to Sandy Hook from New York City in 2005 with her husband, Darryl Gregory, band director at Schaghticoke Middle School in New Milford, and son, Tain, currently a sophomore at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School in New Haven.

She began her writing career as a journalist for Time and People magazines. When her first novel, All I Need to Get By, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2004, she was nominated for best new author at the African American Literary Awards and hailed by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr, as “potentially one of the best writers of her generation.”

Ms Scott earned a BA in English from Harvard and an MFA in writing, fiction and creative nonfiction, from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her latest novel is Unforgivable Love (William Morrow). She is also the author of an essay collection, Love’s Long Line, from The Ohio State University Press’s Mad Creek Books and a memoir, This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World, co-written with Tain, from Paraclete Press.

Her essays, short stories, and articles have appeared in North American Review, Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Saranac Review, Numéro Cinq, Ruminate, Timberline Review, Barnstorm Literary Journal, Sleet Magazine, NewYorkTimes.com, More, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Her essay “Why I Didn’t Go to the Firehouse” is listed among the Notables in Best American Essays 2017.

Ms Scott teaches at Regis University’s Mile High MFA and Bay Path University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She has also hosted the Connecticut Authors Reading Series at C.H. Booth Library and delivered craft talks and held workshops at the Yale Writers’ Workshop, the Madeleine L’Engle Conference, Antioch Writers’ Workshop, Meacham Writers’ Workshop, and the Hobart Festival of Women Writers.

Ms Scott is currently enrolling students for her classes starting February 26 at the Fairfield County Writers’ Studio in Westport; her annual writing retreat, The Write of Your Life, which will take place in Veneto, Italy, September 20-26; and A Circle of Quiet, The Madeleine L’Engle Writing Retreat slated for November 13-15 at the Camp Washington Retreat Center in Morris, Conn. Her website is Sophfronia.com.

Writing and Living into the Next Thought

I find myself in an odd place. I’m mapping the landscape of a fresh loss even as I am untangling a transition in one of my essays. But as I make decisions for my life and as I figure out this essay, I realize there’s something to be learned, one from the other. Let’s take a walk this morning and consider the possibilities.

From my weekly video series: Thinking about how to make smooth transitions.

Holiday head’s up: My publisher, William Morrow/HarperCollins, is making my novel Unforgivable Love available for gift buying at a special price: 99 cents! This is for two weeks only, December 2-16, and you can get it online wherever books are sold. The beautiful cover makes this book an enchanting gift–I hope you’ll buy multiple copies for your friends and family. Take care, enjoy the long weekend, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Yours,

Sophfronia

Don’t Wait to Write About Them

I’ve heard it so many times: I’m going to have to wait until my (mom, dad, aunt, grandmother, grandfather, brothers, sisters, any other relative) dies before I write my story.

I’m sorry to report my mother, aged 87, died this past week. I can tell you now, for certain, the most important things I had to write about her I wrote long before she died. On this morning’s walk, let’s talk about why that writing changed everything for me, and why you don’t want to wait until someone dies to write about them in your story.

Walking in Ohio and thinking about my mother.

Please note: The live Zoom video meeting scheduled for tomorrow is canceled because I’m attending my mother’s funeral. I’ll let you know when I have one on the calendar for December.

Until then, be well and take good and gentle care.

Sophfronia

For the Love of Structure

For this morning’s walk I’m thinking about structure in life and structure on the page. It helps to play with both. On schedules and shaping memoir.

Your Morning Walk with Sophfronia is a YouTube series appearing weekly.

Announcement! The live Zoom video meetings, now dubbed Soph Saturdays, will take place monthly. The next one: November 23 at 12pm ET.
Details forthcoming!

Until then, be well and keep writing!