Connie Hale, Michael Shapiro offer workshop on “A Sense of Place” in Petaluma, Thursday, March 20, 7pm

The key to making a travel story – or just about any kind of story – compelling is a convincing sense of place. Readers want to know where they are, and this can be conveyed with everything from distinctive dialogue to landscape portrayals. Instilling a sense of place into one’s writing is essential, and a skill that takes time to hone.

Authors Michael Shapiro and Connie Hale will show you how to do this well by sharing examples from their own work as well as from the work of masters ranging from Mark Twain to Isabel Allende to Jonathan Raban. The workshop will be the March edition of the Petaluma Writers Forum, all are welcome: Thursday, March 20, 7pm to 9pm, Petaluma Community Center, 320 No. McDowell Blvd., Petaluma, $10.

Hale and Shapiro will discuss some of their favorite places and how the bring them to life on the page. We’ll also be selling our books, so if you’d like a signed copy of Shapiro’s “A Sense of Place” or Hale’s “Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch” come join us for what promises to be a night of stimulating conversation.

Constance Hale is the author of Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Prose, as well as Sin and Syntax and Wired Style. She curates Sin and Syntax, an online salon “for those who love wicked good prose.” She has been a staff editor at the Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner, Wired, and Health magazines, and her journalism has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Los Angeles Times, Honolulu, and many other national publications. Her eight-part series on writing a sentence is at The New York Times’ Opinionator. Hale also edits books and is a founder of The Prose Doctor.

 

Michael Shapiro’s article on Jan Morris’s Wales was a cover story for National Geographic Traveler. He also writes for American Way, Mariner, Islands, and The Sun – and contributes to the travel sections of the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle. Shapiro is author of A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration and wrote the text for the pictorial book, Guatemala: A Journey Through the Land of the Maya. A native of New York, he’s lived in Sonoma County for almost 20 years, and in Petaluma since 2009.

Join us: Thursday, March 20, 7pm to 9pm, Petaluma Community Center, 320 No. McDowell Blvd., Petaluma, $10.