Writing from the Womb Available ONLINE

ANNOUNCING For the first time Writing from the Womb will be available as an online course. I am so excited to be able to offer a course where writers from all over the world can participate. All you need is internet and a laptop and you are part of this powerful community of writers. Because…

Day 2: WFW Morning Session

This morning we continue to build plot treatment. If you have completed your plot treatment begin to look at what you have. Read your work carefully paying close attention to where you can further develop scenes. Have you said everything that needs to be said in this scene? Have you fully developed your character? Add…

Things Will Unstitch Us…

Excerpts from Chris Abani's Ted Talk on Humanity: "This woman -- during the Biafran war, we were caught in the war. It was my mother with five little children. It takes her one year, through refugee camp after refugee camp, to make her way to an airstrip where we can fly out of the country.…

What makes life worthwhile?

"I'm always trying to write about the most important things that people do. The places in their lives where they feel the greatest stress, the places where they feel the greatest passion and how they deal with those things and how they survive them and make their lives go on. Being in love with somebody…

The Value of a Great Story!

"I value story above all else. I'm talking about my written work-in the movies I value the images-but in the books I value the story. The story has its own meaning. A story has its own significance. And sometimes the characters in that story can almost become transparent. This is true in fairytales, for instance.…

Balancing Vulnerability with Transformation

"African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves -- how as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent. The question is, how do I balance narratives that are wonderful with…

Literature is a Gift from the Writer

"I don't like thinking that what I write comes from or is synonymous to a dream. I've heard writers speaking about novels as being extended dreams. I don't like that because dreams, to me, mean selfish gestures. I like the other notion that literature is a GIFT from the WRITER to the reader." ~ Richard…

When the words in a dream are loud

"So much of what we do in those hours when we're actually making sentences, inventing characters and feeling our way through the threads of a plot, is hunch and feel-half unconscious and somewhat autohypnotic. Those rituals of getting ready to write seem to conduce a kind of trance state. ...I am a poet of awareness…

The Writing Midwife

In the Writing from the Womb workshop I work closely with writers at all levels who have chosen me as their “Writing Midwife” to walk with them on this incredibly lonely journey that is the writers life. Over the years, Writing from the Womb has grown into the most sacred model of what it means to…

You have to give everything away every single time!

Writers, we fear so many things. That we won't have what it takes. That we will run out of words. Perhaps that great idea should go in another book. "Often the writing process is filled with a sense of jeopardy because, in essence, with every book I turn myself inside out. One of the things…