Freelance Writing Classes Offered in Greater Kansas City Metro Area
October 20, 2009
Golden Falling, originally uploaded by fotografika phantastika *away*.
Six-Week Freelance Writing Classes
Begin Early November
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Always wanted to write articles for magazines or newspapers? Learn all you need to know to get started, from terminology, generating ideas, writing to editors and constructing articles, as well as marketing your talents . A native from Kansas City, Kerri Buckley returns from the Pacific Northwest, and will offer this six-week freelance writing workshop in several areas of the metro area, including Lawrence and a North of the River locations. Classes begin first week of November, runs for six weeks, includes final reading and writers’ party.
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The cost is $100, and includes workbook. For more information on location, or to register please email goldenwordsmith (@) yahoo.com
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Overland Park, KS – Starts, Monday November 16 7 to 9 pm
Lawrence, KS – Starts Tuesday, November 23 7 to 9 pm
(freelance writer’s party to follow on an extra date with writer’s gift exchange and reading)
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Specialized Classes
(dates to be announced)
The Blogging Class – Three separate meetings
The Niche Class – One class
Creating a Writing Map For 2010 – Marketing, Platform and Goals (Once)
(These three classes will meet in the Overland Park location — Please email for more details)
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November 14, 2009
illustration friday { modify, originally uploaded by Little Lina.
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Fall Classes Are Posted!
September 3, 2009
Guest Poet Blogger: Julene Tripp Weaver
April 28, 2009
My social Network on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and MyblogLog, originally uploaded by luc legay.
Twitter: A Place to Play with Language Shorts
Facebook Status Statement Rang in National Poetry Month
By Julene Tripp Weaver
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Happy National Poetry Month!!
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Twitter is a new language play land; you can find me there @trippweavepoet. Many use Twitter for wordsmith play. My twitter friend sends out a daily word prompt, @poetwist, and what a perfect place for Haiku!
Here are some of my Tweets from days gone by (I could not help but edit a teeny tiny bit):
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carrot turnip rutabaga parsnip beet/eat roots/cilantro & green onion rich underground mineral perfection for our ingestion.
dual cancellation=free time: Lenin oversees Fremont: exit shoes=earth=calm: Oscar Wilde=feminist-flip-flop verse: precocious time.
we cannot interrogate words on a page, not you, nor Freud, Plato or Socrates, but we talk endless interpretation breathing ourselves to life
slow temple: bone—a long stretch—blues bullet in the brain—stop such pain: blame: bullets sold out: temple pressure point nil: chill
snake a break, eat a tad, take a caffeine/theobromine jag, forget spelling, even if it is compelling, eyes lock forward on text need rest.
I finger knotted birch, the red copper hemming on a basket woven, cross hatched rough skin, an outside life we wish to conceive, breathe.
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Then there is Facebook, where National Month started with a word blast organized by Seattle poet Dana Guthrie Martin. She made up the name, FaBoSteMe, for Facebook Statement Me and posted an event page. She sent out a call to write a series of status statement updates on Facebook, each writer did a half hour improvisational writing sprint. There was words flying from 6:30 a.m. through midnight. Many new friends were made.
Yes, I signed up! Facebook with its additional character capability gives even more word play space.
My tactic for this Facebook challenge? I used quotes from poetry books that are stacked on my floor (a great storage place for books!). I usually check (with a pencil) lines that I resonate with. I spent about an hour prep time flipping through books jotting down lines. When it was my turn, I entered the line in quotes with the name of the poet, then wrote a improvisational response!
It was stressful due to computer worries, but fun! Below are a few samples from my FaBoSteMe posts:
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FaBoSteMe Posts
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“The first few steps are/hard anywhere.” Clarence Major, Waiting for Sweet Betty
Tell me about it, how the earth intrudes in it’s misery undergrowth.
“Subtraction is about take away,/but what is left is never enough…” Jayne Pupek, Forms of Intercession
This game where we lose ground,
mountains blown asunder by our own hand.
“…a new peace,/an egg-blue lease on calm…” Kevin Clark, In the Evening of No Warning
accurate as bronze on pipes
the water inside running silent
in our walls blood cool as a snake.
“…powdered milk of human kindness…” Reginald Shephard, Angel, Interrupted
raining talc on a babies rump the glide of your forgiveness
“Or what peace I thought I’d find there/in the steel-ribbed cage of a captured god.” Michelle Bitting, Good Friday Kiss
in the brazed cavern of some holy
bereft I said a prayer
Try this exercise yourself! Use your favorite books, find some favorite lines, respond in your own words on either Facebook Statement or Twitter.
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Thank you for reading my guest blog!
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Julene Tripp Weaver has a chapbook written from the work I do in the world, “Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues” (Finishing Line Press). Garrison Keillor featured a poem from it on The Writer’s Almanac: a poet’s dream come true!
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Guest Poet Blogger: Alex Grant: The Ringmaster
April 25, 2009
Carousel Dreams VI, originally uploaded by georgiannalane.
The Ringmaster
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The first ring is contained in a small box no bigger than your fingernail.
We keep it on a shelf with minor planets and constellations-the beasts,
people, sawdust-the random arrangement of atoms and circumstances
that make up the world. I once knew a woman who believed that every
moment of every life was moving inexorably toward the same vanishing
point-the myriads moving on a giant canvas toward an invisible pinhole
somewhere in the middle distance. The stars continue to burn. The seas
pay homage to the sky. The brittle shards of days under your fingernails.
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The Magician by Alex Grant
April 25, 2009
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The Magician
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Stars on his fingernails, sky in his hair, breath of the sea in his voice.
His father sailed west on an Ottoman clipper, journey of the Magus
from Constantinople. The magician knows the world, feels its blind
dominions held tight in the sleight of his hand. We stumble through
the world like drunk men in a fog, outstretched arms clutching at the
air. Now you see it, now you don’t — then he takes your breath away.
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BIO
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Alex Grant’s collection Chains & Mirrors(NCWN/Harperprints) won the 2006 Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize and the 2007 Oscar Arnold Young Award(Best North Carolina poetry collection). His second collection,The White Book, was released in 2008 by Main St. Rag Publishing. His full-length ms., Fear of Moving Water, a recent finalist for the Philip Levine, Brittingham & Pollak, Tupelo Open and Lena-Miles WeverTodd prizes, will be released by Wind Publications in late 2009. His poems have appeared or are upcoming in a number of national journals, including The Missouri Review, Smartish Pace, Best New Poets 2007, Arts & Letters, The Connecticut Review, Nimrod and Seattle Review. He lives in Chapel Hill , NC , with his wife, Tristi, his dangling participles and his Celtic fondness for excess. The Magician was a recent Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review.
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Web page:
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Fruit Fix by Diane Lockward
April 21, 2009
Fruit Fix
…………I’m often asked why I write poems about fruit—the strawberry, blueberry, apricot, apple, and others. My obsession with fruit is part of a larger larger obsession with food in general. Of course, it goes back to my childhood. I was a fussy eater whose father insisted that every plate be cleaned. I became adept at surreptitiously getting rid of what I could not bear to swallow. I made unnecessary trips to the bathroom to flush away wads of liver. I coughed asparagus into napkins. I stuffed my pockets with filet of sole. I plastered cottage ham under the dining room table. I risked danger. Food could get me in trouble.
…………….In early adolescence I was a bit pudgy. The foods I loved—cake, cookies, candy, ice cream sundaes—were prohibited by my father who wanted me slender. My cravings only increased. I longed for something sweet and sticky. On the sly I consumed entire jars of Marshmallow Fluff. …………….I went to Sunday school, racking up eleven years of perfect attendance. That’s where I first met Eve and learned about the garden, the snake, and the apple. I must have filed all of that away for future use. Fruit, temptation, capitulation.
……………And then I saw the 1963 film, Tom Jones. I was mesmerized by that famous eating scene in which Tom and a buxom woman he meets at an inn sit at opposite ends of a long table and proceed to rip apart chicken legs and stuff their faces with juicy grapes, all the while gazing at each other with—yes!—seduction in their eyes. Food and sex. Of course! An extension of the apple.
…………… I have been punished for my transgressions. Several years ago I developed a cranky stomach. Right at the top of the list of foods I could no longer eat—most of my favorite fruits. I only want them more. I am tantalized by their colors and aromas, their suggestive shapes, their various textures, the seeds, the skin. They are dangerous. They will make me suffer. I only want them more.
……………..Writing about fruit is my way of getting what I want.
Organic Fruit by Diane Lockward
April 21, 2009
Illustration Avacados, originally uploaded by rainy city.
Organic Fruit
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I want to sing
a song worthy of
the avocado, renegade
fruit, strict individualist, pear
gone crazy. Praise to its skin
like an armadillo’s, the refusal
to adulate beauty. Schmoo-shaped
and always face forward, it is what it
is. Kudos to its courage, its inherent love
of democracy. Hosannas for its motley coat,
neither black, brown, nor green, but purple-hued,
like a bruise. Unlike the obstreperous coconut, the
avocado yields to the knife, surrenders its hide of leather,
blade sliding under the skin and stripping the fruit. Praise
to its nakedness posed before me, homely, yellow-green,
and slippery, bottom-heavy like a woman in a Renoir, her
flesh soft velvet. I cup the fruit in my palm, slice and hold,
slice and hold, down to the stone at the core, firm fist at the
center. Pale peridot crescents slip out, like slivers of moon.
Exquisite moment of ripeness! a dash of salt, the first bite
squishes between tongue and palate, eases down my
throat, oozes vitamins and oil. Could anything be more
delicious, more digestible? Plaudits to its versatility,
yummy in Cobb salad, saucy in guacamole, boldly
stuffed with crabmeat. My avocado dangles from
a tree, lifts its puckered face to the sun, pulls
all that light inside. Praise it for being small,
misshapen, and durable. Praise it for
the largeness of its heart.
Diane Lockward Bio
April 20, 2009
Diane Lockward is the author of What Feeds Us, (Wind Publications, 2006). The collection received the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. Diane is also the author of two previous collections, Eve’s Red Dress (Wind Publications, 2003) and a chapbook, Against Perfection (Poets Forum Press, 1998). Her poems have been published in several anthologies, including Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times. Her poems have also appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poetry International, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner.
Diane is the recipient of a 2003 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and has received awards from North American Review, Louisiana Literature, the Newburyport Art Association, and the St. Louis Poetry Center. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and read by Garrison Keillor on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac.
Diane conducts writing workshops for young and old poets, inexperienced and experienced poets. She also conducts workshops for teachers on how to teach poetry. She was a featured poet at the 2005 Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and a workshop presenter at the New Jersey State Council of Teachers of English Conference in both 2003 and 2006.
Diane has also been a featured poet at a number of festivals, such as the Warren County Poetry Festival, the Inkberry Festival, the Long Branch Poetry Festival, the Walt Whitman Poetry Festival, the 2006 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and the 2007 Burlington Book Festival.
A former high school English teacher, Diane now works as a poet-in-the-schools for both the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
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Guest Poet Blogger: Linda Benninghoff
April 17, 2009
Deer
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They came to Lloyd Neck seeking
New grass and bushes,
A place to roam unseen.
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I see them running through
Our yard,
Sometimes just brown
Backs catching sunlight.
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Yesterday four deer ran through,
Two mothers,
Two fawns,
Their eyes gelling with sunlight,
Their tails lifted high,
Necks outstretched,
Seeking something other
Than what we could give them.
Absorbed, intent–
As if they knew
A surplus of deer
Brings guns.
And although they seem
At one with the winter grass,
Brown oaks, green hemlock,
They carry the weight of death
With their beauty
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Remembering the Catbird
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She came north every summer
Nested in the ilex,
Sat on the metal pole
That marks the oil burner tank
In our yard,
And wanted to do nothing but sing.
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My mother remembers waking to the
Plain bird’s song early in the spring mornings—
As if happiness could begin at sunrise,
Last till evening,
And days could be spent in praise.
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When I discovered the catbird’s rumpled body,
A hand’s span of grey feathers left
Every other part of her disappeared,
She seemed to have no words for me.
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I wonder still why she cannot
Return south this year with her mate
Bring up fledglings,
Sit in the sun and praise
As if praising were everything,
Dying and living nothing
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Linda Benninghoff has published “Remembering the Catbird” in a chapbook of the same name published by MiPoesias.com Benninghoff won a chapbook contest at Kritya in India, and graduated with honors from Johns Hopkins University where she majored in English. She has an MA in English with an emphasis on creative writing from Stony Brook. She has published most recently in MiPoesias, Agenda and Ocho.
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