2023 Workshop Series: Take action now on Literary Submissions and Publication begins 2/28/23

I offer this workshop series the beginning of each new year to refresh and revive our submission goals and process. If you took this workshop last year, all the more reason to take it again and pick up right where you left off. If you haven't yet taken it, get started now! We will share the latest news in the world of publishing in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Reassess your goals or set publishing goals for the first time in your writing life. Learn new tips for editing, researching, tracking submissions, publications. Strengthen your professional presence as a writer. Discover conferences and residencies and workshops that will feed your creativity.

• Tuesday nights February 28th, March 14th and March 28th on Zoom 6-8 pm

• Optional community work sessions in person only on Tuesday nights March 7th and March 21st
  

In a supportive community of writers, discuss tips and trends for submitting your work out into the world. Learn where to research resources for finding the best venue for a writing project and how to prepare a manuscript. Bring your specific questions to the workshops. In our optional work sessions, you can research, revise, edit, and prepare manuscripts for submission. If you are ready, push the SUBMIT button!  

 

$220 for the workshop series including a editorial review of a ten page manuscript ($75 value). 

 

The workshop series will include the latest info:

• where to find the resources you need to get published in all genres
• guidance from an editor
• discussion of your specific questions
• detailed notes for each workshop
• the power of joining a community of writers 
• ten page manuscript review included

Summer is finally here! Three creative writing pop up events in the garden this July

 Summer is finally here! Join us in the garden for a beautiful summer evening of inspiration and writing:

 Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop pop-up in-person - RSVP by phone or email

July 11th and 18th 6:30-8 pm $30/workshop

 
For fiction, nonfiction, poetry, blogging, journaling. All levels of experience. Generate new material with creative prompts and develop writing skills in a supportive community of writers. Includes tea and chocolate.

 

Literary Submissions Garden Party  

Thursday, July 14th 5-8 pm in-person / $45 

RSVP by phone or email

In a supportive community of writers, learn tips and venues for submitting your work out into the world. Learn where to research resources for finding the best venue for your poems, essays, and stories, and how to prepare a manuscript for submission. Gain confidence in a writing community. Bring your specific questions to the workshops. If you are ready, push the SUBMIT button! 

 

Summer literary events - here's where to find your people

 Hi Writers!

I'm collaborating with the Melhop Gallery to offer a new art-based workshop. Ekphrasis comes from the definition “Description” in Greek. Traditionally, an ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the writer may amplify and expand its meaning.Poems and writing in any genre can be informed by visual art, architecture, film, music, and live performance.

“It is as if there is a circuit or feedback loop between the poem—the poem as act of composition, revision, and/or construction—and the art object. … So that when one composes they may be aware of many layers of meditation between themselves and some communion with the work of art.” – Thom Donovan, Harriet  Blog

Join us at the Melhop Gallery in Zephyr Cove on the evening of June 22nd, a Wednesday, to explore the exhibit and to let the art be your guide for new writing!

The gallery is a woman-owned business with a mission to introduce and support practicing artists who are creating art with ethical and conceptual substance. The gallery works with architects and designers helping collectors refine their art collections while helping to build a thriving arts community in Nevada and nearby California.

In addition to exhibiting solo exhibitions of represented artists, Melhop Gallery also exhibits curated group exhibitions that include invited artists as well as those represented.
The gallery is open by appointment, contact hello@melhopgallery.com or keep an eye on social media @melhopgallery7077 and website www.melhopgallery.com for open days.

Here's some approaches to discovering how art can guide your own writing:

• Your writing can be about or for the art as an object
• Your writing can engage with the art or a character within the art
• Your writing can embody the process of the art
• Your writing can help you understand or see in a way you haven't seen before
• Your writing can reflect upon the moment of encounter with the art
• Your writing can contemplate the materials of the art object
• Your writing can imagine what extends beyond the borders of the art

We'll have beverages and snacks, too, so come a bit early to tour the gallery before the workshop begins.

Finally, Tangled Roots Writing is in person in downtown Truckee for playful Monday night creative writing workshop pop ups continuing with four workshops over this summer. These are welcoming generative writing sessions with tea and chocolate in my living room and garden when the weather cooperates.

Do you have a book length writing project or manuscript (novel or memoir) that you want to revise for publication? Join the Master Revision Workshop meeting monthly on Zoom beginning again in September after our summer break.
 

I'm so excited to schedule another Literary Submission Garden Party! We will share the latest news in the world of publishing in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Reassess your goals or set publishing goals for the first time in your writing life. Learn new tips for finding venues to submit your poetry, stories, and essays. Gain the confidence to send your work out into the world and meet other writers in our community.

Please read my blog for more information on the latest workshops with Tangled Roots Writing, or call me at 530-386-3901 to brainstorm about your writing goals. I would love to help you reach them.

Happy writing!
Karen Terrey

Submit? Publish? Blog? Find a private writing retreat?

 

Dear Writers,

 

Many of you have been requesting a workshop on these topics. Here's the scoop on a new series I'm offering Wednesday evenings starting next week:

Virtual! Workshop Series: Literary Submissions and Publication Wednesday nights 2/23 and 3/2 and 3/9

6-8 pm on Zoom

I offer this workshop series at the beginning of each new year to refresh and revive our submission goals and process. We will share the latest news in the world of publishing in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Reassess your goals or set publishing goals for the first time in your writing life. Learn new tips for editing, researching, tracking submissions, publications. Strengthen your professional presence as a writer. Discover conferences and residencies and workshops that will feed your creativity, as well as scholarship and grant opportunities to help finances. Build an multi-planked platform as a writer.

 

In a supportive community of writers, discuss tips and trends for submitting your work out into the world. Learn where to research resources for finding the best venue for a writing project and how to prepare a manuscript. Bring your specific questions to the workshops. If you are ready, push the SUBMIT button! 

$45 each or all 3 for $120

The workshop series will include the latest info:

• where to find the resources you need to get published in all genres
•  guidance from an editor
• discussion of your specific questions
• detailed notes for each workshop
•  the power of joining a community of writers
• tips on how to develop an engaging blog
  

2/23 Wednesday 6-8 pm Workshop 

Literary magazine submissions, chapbooks, and contests for all genres

3/2 Wednesday 6-8 pm Workshop

Author Platform  

Writer residencies, conferences, and workshop opportunities for all genres  

3/9 Wednesday 6-8 pm Workshop

Blogging - find your blog's purpose, create juicy content, engage readers

Call or email me with questions and to sign up.

Virtual Workshop Series: Tools to Write a Blog that Stands Out in a Crowd

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor – Anne Lamott

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.   - Elmore Leonard

This series includes guidance from an editor, discussion of your specific questions and detailed notes for each workshop and most importantly, the power of joining a community of writers.

In this workshop series we will learn techniques to:

·         Find your blog’s purpose

·         Create juicy content

·         Build traffic and community

·         Make time to blog

·         Connect with your audience

·         Techniques to write quality content in less time

·         Develop Purpose and Audience

·         Revitalize a blog

·         Edit your own blog posts

$75 includes workshop 6/17 and 6/24 plus one 30-minute coaching session for your blog

Dates:

Part 1 Workshop Wednesday 6/17 6:30 pm – 8 pm  

Part 2 Workshop Wednesday 6/24 6:30 pm – 8 pm  

Part 3 30-minute coaching session completed before 6/29

New workshop series starts 9/10! Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop

9/10 - 10/15:  Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop 

Starting up again this fall! A fun and generative workshop for artists, beginners, and experienced writers. Do you wish you wrote more? Want to feel a sense of community when you write? Want to start a book or finish a book! This series specifically supports Nanowrimo participants! Craft, technique, and prompts for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. A kick in the butt for your writing life! Connect with a community and improve your writing practice. Tea and chocolate provided. 6 week series Mondays from 6:00 to 8 pm. $150. Downtown Truckee. 

I decided to take a writing class by Karen Terrey through Tangled Roots Writing as a last attempt to gain the upper hand over Writer's Block. And to my surprise, she gave me more gun powder than I could have ever expected. Through her class, I was able to write some of my favorite scenes for a trilogy I'm writing and since taking her class, I'm back on a normal writing schedule. I'm very thankful for Kat and her dedication to writing. - Courtney

Thank you so much for the wonderful writing experiences.  I came home Monday night and told my husband how much I absolutely love and value your classes, your prompts, your insight and how taking your classes has really helped me in trying to move my writing beyond the hobby level. - Liz

The Monday Night Writing classes are fabulous. - Clare

21 Days on the Colorado River: Kiss the Lip

The wind at the Patio at Deer Creek carries voices from millions of years ago.  You can hear it here:
https://www.facebook.com/karen.terrey.3

I dream of the river every night.  The white noise of rapids and the placid surface of the slow still parts, where deep water meets the schist walls on both sides.

I look over the edge into glassy pour overs.  As your raft approaches the drop, you can't see anything further in front of you and you also can't stop your momentum.  You speed up as current grabs the boat. You hear the rapid and white tails splash above the horizon line in surges.  Are you sure you want to be here? I call out.

Then I am leaning over the rock holding on to the front lines on the raft.  The glassy stream of water is stretched thinly here so I can see through to the colors, reds and grays with white air bubbles clinging to the rock.  The boat is sucked down and I feel a tug beneath us before we shoot across sideways and then up the next wave.

Build a Professional Writer Platform

My own focus most often is on the craft side of writing and the business side of a writing life can seem distracting to the "art".  Now that I consider it, much of my daily time is spent building the business of my writing in many small ways.  Before your writing project is ready for publication, there are things you can be doing now to prepare your audience to receive your work.

Your platform as a writer includes all the different ways you can be present in the lives of your audience.  First, you need to figure out who is your audience - and to do this you need to figure out what you have to give them.  What do you have to offer?  What do you have to sell?  What needs does it fulfill?  Spend some time writing on these questions.

Think of your platform as having planks.  Each plank is a way of putting yourself out there.

Internet:
Blog
Social Media
Email lists
Website
Newsletter

Media:
Articles and reviews you publish in magazines and newspapers
Other publications
Radio
TV

In Person:
Readings and book signings
Other writers' readings and book signings
Literary festivals, workshops, retreats and conferences
Talks you give
Classes you teach
Giving back to your community - volunteering
Supporting other writers - brainstorm what do you have to give?

Read writer Angela Render's blog for more great ideas to build your platform.

To get the brainstorming juices flowing, answer these questions for yourself:

1. Why do you write?
2. What do you write about?
3. What is your unique perspective?
4. What needs and emotions do you cater to or go after?
5. What is your message?
6. Who is your audience?
7. Which planks do you currently have and which ones would you like to add to your platform as a professional writer?

Now set your goals for this year:

Latest Scoop on Publication, Readings and Workshops

This March my poetry chapbook titled Bite and Blood was accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press, a press in Kentucky that specializes in poetry.  I'm so excited to be working with such a beautiful press on my first book.  The release date is October 15th - I'll let you know when the book is available to order and where you can hear me read.

The LiteraryArts & Wine Reading Series at Uncorked in downtown Truckee has been a great success - join us on the third Sunday of each month at 5:30 to hear 4 different authors each month read from recently published work and work in progress.  We keep the line-up varied so you'll listen to fiction, essay, poetry, and who knows what new hybrid genre.

The Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop meeting June 2, 9, and 16 has room for a few drop-ins.  If you've been wanting to see what this fun workshop is all about or if you miss a sense of community in your writing life, get in touch with me and join us for an evening.  I'll have a new series starting up September 1^st.

One of my goals is to work more with teens and creative writing so I was happy Jackie McKinney called me this spring to help her lead a CreativeWriting Workshop for Teens at the Family Resource Center.  The workshops are free Monday afternoons 3-4:30 pm. Please help spread the word to any teens that want to develop some writing skills and get their words on the page!

The popular How to Write a Blog that Stands Out in a Crowd workshop is offered June 30th for anyone who wants to start a new blog or to re-energize a current blog.  Learn techniques to write more efficiently and focused for your target audience.  Thank you to local photographer Scott Thompson for the photo!

I'm always available for coaching for book projects, copy editing, dissertation and other writing projects.  I'm working with several students over the summer to develop writing skills for school. If you haven't already, "like" my Tangled Roots Writing page on Facebook to see updates on poems I've published, local events, and other workshops. 

30 poems in 30 days: Day One Prompt

Morning Song

I wake up at 4 am to chalky light from the moon through the high narrow window above my bed. Sometimes when you can't sleep through the night, again and again, it helps to remember you aren't alone as an unskilled sleeper.  In fact, there is a whole form in poetry dedicated to this time of day, early morning, just before sunrise.  The aubade is defined by The Poetry Foundation as a love poem or song welcoming or lamenting the arrival of the dawn, originating in medieval France.  While John Donne's "The Sun Rising" is a traditional example, I read Phillip Larkin's aubade below and felt a closer connection, especially with the first 4 lines of the last stanza. Although his poem is quite dark, see Louise Bogan's "LeaveTaking" for an aubade with a very different tone.

I'll be posting a new writing prompt each day of November to support my fundraising efforts for The Center for New Americans. Today's writing prompt is to write a welcome or a lament to the morning.  You can use Larkin's poem as a model or an antithesis of your poem.  Happy writing!


Aubade by Phillip Larkin

 

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   

Till then I see what’s really always there:   

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   

Making all thought impossible but how   

And where and when I shall myself die.   

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   

—The good not done, the love not given, time   

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because   

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   

That slows each impulse down to indecision.   

Most things may never happen: this one will,   

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without   

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Blog as Personal Essay: Friends, Flight, and Norton

How Flight by Sherman Alexie and Joseph Epstein’s Introduction to Norton’s Book of Personal Essay shine some light on writing blogs

1. Writing for friends or strangers

Do people read blogs?  So many people want to write a blog for their business.  Or to sell a book that they haven’t written yet.  Or just to be heard.   An assumption behind writing the blog is that one has something to say that is interesting to strangers.  Gertrude Stein said that she writes for herself and for strangers.  Her writing is not easy to pick up, read, and feel like a friend.  Joseph Epstein says in his introduction to the Norton Book of Personal Essay, published in 1997, that to write an essay, one must imagine writing for potential friends.  I didn’t know I’d find so much insight into blog writing in an essay on personal essays.

I love quotes and Epstein has the good quotes.  He says that V.S. Naipaul has said “lucky is the writer who has found his or her true form.” Vaipaul, a well-written novelist, said that he won’t write any more fiction.  He considers the novel no longer “a useful form for conveying the complex truths of our day.” 

2. The blog is the new democratic essay

I just finished Flight by Sherman Alexie.  In it, Zits, the half-Indian teenager, time travels in other people’s bodies through violent wars between Native Americans and the FBI, General Custer and other armies, as well as modern day streets of Seattle, where people step over his homeless Indian body by the dumpster. Near the late middle of the book, Zits, aka an Indian boy in the late 1800’s, discovers that he doesn’t know who is good and who is not good anymore, which killing is right and which is not right.  “I am myself, and the white soldier my father wants me to kill, as well as the Indians he has killed, and his own family,” Zits thinks to himself while standing over a soldier’s body.

Flight makes its reader question how they know something to be true or to be right.  The reader questions even if it is possible to know something is true or right.  Well, I know what is right, but you do too, and we differ. Epstein mentions that at different time periods, various genres become the dominant form according to circumstances of the day.  George Lukacs, a Hungarian critic, predicts the personal essay may become the reigning form of the modern age, a time of transition, because it is the form for uncertainty and skepticism. 

But is the essay the form best suited for the time we live in?  Maybe the blog is the quick democratic video-version of the essay, a new form better suited for the information age. If the blog is in some ways a modern day personal essay, then the crucial element of an essay that Epstein outlines is relevant to how we write blogs; how do we write in a way that makes our personal experience significant as universal experience while still somehow distinguishing our individuality? 

3. Make our personal experience significant to others

Epstein suggests that discovering how our individual experience transcends into universal experience is the “magic” of the essay.  He says the essay is a form of discovery in which the writer tests their own feelings with a personal honesty, through a familiar style that creates an “amiable community” between the reader and the audience.  Not quite the definition of a blog, and yet, a description of an exceptional blog. 

A few blogs draw me into their text because I sense something that connects with and shines a light on my own experience.  Or the blog expresses an experience extraordinary, as Epstein writes of essays, in a manner that allows me to recognize that extraordinariness.  I would want this writer to become a friend because they have honestly shown me a bit of what makes them who they are, their own truth, and it shines some light on my own.

30 poems in 30 days success!

In November I committed to write 30 poems in 30 days of November to raise money for Center For New Americans, an organization in Western Mass. that helps families with literacy and work training. How often can poetry be so directly connected to outreach?

Along with many other poets, we raised over $20,000 dollars for the Center for New Americans - thank you everyone who donated!

From 30 poems in 30 days

Undercurrent
For Kathleen

If we ever sat on a rock on the coast of Maine
it would be dinnertime -
sunset staining the slate water, waves slapping
the blue painted keels of boats anchored nearby.


Gulls would check us out for sandwich scraps.
Red combed mergansers
would sail past, moving without moving.
We’d chip quartz crystals from veins in the granite
with dirty fingernails, veins darkened red and brown
but the chips milky white,
tiny shards of moon in your hand.
You want to collect a good one for Joe,
talk of places you imagined in your sleep.
You say we have to remember this place.


I memorize your silhouette with
ocean between forested islands beyond,
currents we can’t see making passage uncertain.


The sun has set, dinner is ready -
we’ve missed the laughter in the house.
Alone outside, ducks retreat to safe places, tuck heads beneath wings,
boats bob in silence, the moon casts our shadows
across seaweedy sand, a breeze cuts my neck,
the lobsters are red, their screams
are finished, the butter is melted.


Tomorrow you’ll chase me from dock
to dock as I jump
into the ferry wake after Joe, him yelling
Let’s do it again! Jump
Jump!


In the middle of the night steady rain will fall
on the old roof and the bent apple tree
and the quilt of green
where the baby practiced walking
(something significant that we forget ourselves)
hard rain dappling the flat ocean
while underneath, current cuts
deep channels deeper
as your mind grows deeper –


I wonder
what’s out there
between our island and the mainland.
A minke whale bends,
someone will see it in early morning
like a mirage of night sky.


But tonight we listen to the calming,
grass stems spider webs everything pressed
down, air glistening,
moonlight striated across the heavy ocean like milky crystal.