Women Who Submit is excited to hold its first workshop series with three LA-based professional poets and writers who will share personal writing and accountability tools for success in order to help writers craft their next poem, essay, or story and build confidence in their own process. This workshop series offers an opportunity for people of all genders, genres and skill levels to gain practical take-aways from three of Los Angeles’ most fresh and exciting WWS authors and work with an organization dedicated to growing a socially conscious and diverse community focused on supporting women and nonbinary writers in the pursuit of equal representation in publishing and writing programs.
The Women Who Submit Fall Workshop Series, in partnership with PEN Center USA and Avenue 50 Studios, is a not-for-profit event created as a fundraiser for future WWS programming, events, and conference presentations. It is open to people of all genders, orientations, and creeds.
On Silence in Poetry with Ashaki M. Jackson
Saturday, October 1, 2016
10am-1pm at PEN Center USA
Tickets: $80 regular / $60 WWS & PEN
On Writing and Movement with Jay O’Shea
Saturday, November 5, 2016
10am-1pm at PEN Center USA
Tickets: $80 regular / $60 WWS & PEN
From Public Notebook to Book with Wendy C. Ortiz
Saturday, December 3, 2016
10am-1pm at PEN Center USA
Tickets: $80 regular / $60 WWS & PEN
Each workshop, led by a WWS member, leans into their own particular approach to developing work from inception to execution. A $200 ($150 for PEN and WWS members) discount is available for purchasing all three workshops.
On Silence in Poetry with Ashaki M. Jackson
October 1, 2016 / 10:00a – 1:00p
About the workshop: Guided by poems written by Kimiko Hahn, Shane Book, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Eduardo C. Corral and Chiyuma Elliott, participants will briefly discuss space as a means to call for quiet in writing. We’ll explore where space functions as a silencer and spend the period crafting terms and designing stanzas that call for quiet.
About the Facilitator: Ashaki M. Jackson is an applied social psychologist, program evaluator and poet who works with youth through research, evaluation and creative writing mentoring. She is a Cave Canem alumna, VONA alumna and co-founder of Women Who Submit. Her work appears inCURA and Prairie Schooner among other publications. Author of two chapter-length collections – Surveillance (Writ Large Press) and Language Lesson (MIEL) – Jackson earned her creative writing MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles and a psychology doctorate from Claremont Graduate University. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
On Movement and Writing with Jay O’Shea
November 5, 2016 / 10:00a – 1:00p
About the Workshop: Movement is often assumed to escape description. All too often, writers, be they fiction writers, memoirists, or academics skirt around movement as though it were incidental to more substantial issues of character, dialogue, concept, and theme. In this workshop, we treat movement as central, seeing it as a place where character, narrative arcs, and imagery can emerge in a different, sometimes more vivid, way than they do through dialogue and description.
We will explore techniques for translating physical movement into writing, focusing on authorial voice, descriptive devices, and structure.
This workshop is suitable for participants of any ability or experience level. The only requirement is an interest in, curiosity about, or appreciation for physical activity; no prior movement training or experience is necessary. Fiction, non-fiction, and poetry are all welcome as modes of engagement with the subject.
About the Facilitator: Martial artist and author Jay O’Shea lives and works in Los Angeles. A Professor of Dance Studies at UCLA, she recently offered a TED talk, entitled Beyond Winning, which focuses on the individual and societal benefits of physical play. She has written and edited several books on dance; her essays have been published in three languages and six countries. Her short fiction has appeared in Bartleby Snopes, Toasted Cheese, and in the anthologies Bloody Knuckles, Death’s Realm, and The Female Complaint. She is currently completing a non-fiction manuscript entitled Risk, Failure, Play: What Martial Arts Reveals about Proficiency, Competition, and Cooperation.
Public Notebook to Book with Wendy C. Ortiz
December 3, 2016 / 10:00a – 1:00p
About the Workshop: There are infinite ways and means of writing a book, and social media platforms such as tumblr, Twitter, and Snapchat offer some particular and innovative ways of moving from the “public notebook” to book. Hollywood Notebook, a prose poem-ish memoir, and Bruja, a dreamoir, both began as public notebooks and eventually found their way to becoming print books. We will discuss different social media platforms and how using them in specific ways can contribute to multiple narrative threads we might use in the creation of a book. Discussion topics will include journaling, persona, audience, and the art of omission. By workshop end, participants will have experimented with creating a “public notebook.”
About the Facilitator: Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir (Future Tense Books, 2014), Hollywood Notebook (Writ Large Press, 2015), and the dreamoir Bruja (CCM, 2016). Her work has been profiled or featured in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and the National Book Critics Circle Small Press Spotlight blog. Wendy lives in Los Angeles.