The Beginning
Fifteen miles into my three-hour road trip to the Okoboji Writers and Songwriters Retreat, I turned my Subaru Forester around. Adjusting the rearview mirror, I had noticed a tiny hair sticking out of my right nostril. Or was it my left? Mirrors are confusing.
But not the image of my grooming kit sitting on the kitchen table, and not in my suitcase. Anticipating a new experience makes me nervous. I blame my mother for sending me to kindergarten at 4. Since then, any new playground seems overwhelming.
Throughout my 76 years, I’ve had many security blankets. Ever since my nose and ear hairs started sprouting at an ever-accelerating rate, three decades ago, it’s been my personal care utensils.
What would my writer workshop cohort think of me, with a log sticking out of my nose? It’s easy for real writers not to care about insignificant matters such as personal grooming. They have books that sit as sentries, mocking the pretenders as they wait in line to register and be assigned their rooms.
You understand the problem, don’t you? Perhaps you, too, in similar circumstances, have felt like an imposter, even when surrounded by a gaggle of charming, ordinary-looking people, some of whom, truth be told, could use a trim here, a snip there, or a tuck somewhere.
“And all,” as one of our presenters reminded us, “are writers with unique stories to tell.”
Even trimmed, snipped, and tucked me.
The Middle
Iowa, believe it or not, is a writer’s paradise. It has the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop located on the campus of the University of Iowa. And now, planted five years ago, this annual late September three-day conference is rooted in a beautiful piece of land surrounded by five interconnected lakes in north central Iowa. It has grown from 50 participants in the first year to 300 this year.
Every morning, we would gather early in this tent to hear a little music and short introductions by the day’s workshop speakers.
We would then scatter across the wooded Lakeside Laboratory campus to one of fifteen options, with two 75-minute sessions each morning and afternoon. The intention is to have each workshop small enough for conversation and tutoring. The number of participants in the ten classes I attended ranged from ten to twenty-five.
The speakers were uniformly gregarious, professional, and insightful.
To give you a sense of the smorgasbord of choices, here were mine over two and a half days.
Storytelling Basics
The Art of Brevity
How to get others to care about your memoir
How to find and grow your original idea
Opinion writing: Finding your voice
Lazy Use of Language and Rethinking Words
Investigative Journalism and Democracy
Songwriting as Storytelling
Poetry as a coping tool
Making Broccoli Delicious (about how to make a dull story interesting)
And here are my favorite quotes from presenters.
I have to write to live.
Find the angle that nobody else sees.
You are the only one who sees things as you do. That is your power.
A story (memoir) is a vehicle for transcendence.
I moved back to Iowa from Florida because I noticed that in Florida, I saw no bookshelves and very large shoe closets.
One secret to writing is to create momentum. Always leave something unfinished for tomorrow.
The reader looks for any reason to stop reading. Don’t give them that reason. Never start a sentence with THE and do not overuse commas. And put your hook in the first sentence. Eliminate spare wording. Hemingway never wrote a sentence of more than 12 words.
Begin your story with a scene (action, dialogue, character, and setting).
The End
It turns out I wasn’t the only imposter.
I met many who questioned their writerly credentials.
John has self-published two mysteries, but “don’t real writers find real publishers?”
Dennis, a retired Navy officer and attorney, has stories inside him that have started to come out, with the help of last year’s workshop, so his wife sent him back for another dose. He’s taking baby steps.
Kathy, whose husband died four years ago, has just finished a book that has been accepted by a New York publisher for a “memoir of mourning” that she started writing after the first Okoboji workshop.
Ernest, a self-described blue-collar worker, has kept a journal for years, and now “it’s time to give it form and structure.”
Hi, I’m Paul, with a few scholarly articles in a fifty-year academic career. In the spring of 2018, I wrote weekly stories for friends and relatives about a four-month experience with college students on the island nation of Malta. After retiring in that same year, I started a blog on WordPress, paulmuses.com. A few years later, I joined Medium. Now, 700+ stories later, I guess,
I AM A WRITER.
