Entry # 202 - "Writers' Conferences Are Good For You"

Maybe - Peggy's Cove - Photo Credit  - Jim Wilson - 2013

Writing is a solitary enterprise for the most part. Upon occasion, all writers should go to some kind of writing conference.  It is an enlightening experience. Meeting other writers is good for you. Most writers spend hours staring at their computer screens or journals. Many of us talk to ourselves while we work. A few of us sing softly under our breath and our families worry about us.  After too much time alone we need to rise up and connect with other writers for the sake of our work and our sanity. We need to find some like-minded solitary souls for support and information. We can not exist in isolation all the time.

So look within your local writing community and see how you can connect. There are always people writing. If you don't know how to connect, do an Internet search, go to your state's writing groups and join an association, or go to a local coffee shop, work up your courage, and go over and talk with that quiet person typing away on a laptop. Don't be a pain - just ask if they are a writer and what kind of writing they like to do - then play it from there. 

Most of us who write are quiet, shy, introverted folk who don't do well with public displays of inquiry, but writers do tend to recognize kindred spirits. And most are gentle people who want to help - in fact - most are longing to help with the kind of hot enthusiasm that you will encounter in an interaction with a dedicated librarian - since they (writers & librarians) tend to be quiet people who love books, ideas, and helping people discover information.

Last Saturday, February 22, 2014, I attended my fifth or sixth Bay to Ocean (BTO) Writers Conference sponsored by the Eastern Shore Writers Association at Chesapeake College in Wye Mills, MD. It was time well spent.  I recommend this conference. Go online if you live in the DELMARVA area, but you'll need to sign up early next December, because it sells out fast and they close the sign up after they have two hundred applicants. So look around in your community and see how you can find other writers who are doing what you love to do. . . which is to write and write some more. Then go and share with others. It's good for you.

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Peggy's Cove - Photo Credit - Jan Bowman - 2013

About Jan Bowman

Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award, Jan's stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best American Short Stories, and a Pen/O’Henry award.  Glimmer Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Awards for New Writers.

A recent story was a finalist for the 2013 Broad River Review RASH Award for Fiction, another story was a 2013 finalist in the Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest.  Jan’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others.   She is working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection, Mermaids & Other Stories.  She has nonfiction publications in Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and publishers.   Learn more at: www.janbowmanwriter.com or  visit blog:  http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Facebook:  janbowman.77@facebook.com

Entry # 201 - "Fiction as The Real Deal"

In Thomas C. Foster’s book, How to Read Like a Professor, Foster says that not only does writing come from experience, but so does reading. He says, "Whatever the sources of the narrative, what matters ultimately for readers is the sense that this thing is genuine, that it has the solidity of the real deal." Readers draw from their own lives as they read. 

Photo Credit - Jan Bowman

Fiction must make us believe in a world filled with people who are credible renditions of real life, telling true stories that did not happen, and yet "fiction reveals truth in ways that feels right, feels authentic and counterfeit."  

Foster describes the difficulty writers face in trying to "make us [as readers] care about something that we never even thought about, and make it seem like our own idea." He calls this The Law of Novel Paradox: Novels grow out of intensely private obsessions, which writers then must make public and accessible to readers. They [writers] have to move from autobiography, or even diary, to public discourse."  Readers can only connect from their own experiences and a belief that what is described could be true, and yet the paradox is that as readers, "We treat fictional narrative as true, even while acknowledging that it is manifestly false." And it's quite a 'hat-trick' for writers of fiction, whether of short stories or novels, to view themselves as professional truth-tellers, while making it up as they go, drawing stories from the waters of their imaginations. I am thinking about this as I write a new story.

Photo Credit - Jan Bowman - Annapolis, MD - Bay

“Fiction cuts itself loose from the moorings of reality so that it can give pleasure, so that the imagination can run free of any constraints but its own."  --- Thomas C. Foster’s book, How to Read Like a Professor ==========================

About Jan Bowman

Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award, Jan's stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best American Short Stories, and a Pen/O’Henry award.  Glimmer Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Awards for New Writers. 

A recent story was a finalist for the 2013 Broad River Review RASH Award for Fiction, another story was a 2013 finalist in the Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest.  Jan’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others. 

Coming Soon - Mermaids & Other Stories

  She is working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection, Mermaids & Other Stories.  She has nonfiction publications in Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and publishers.   Learn more at: www.janbowmanwriter.com or  visit blog:  http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Facebook:  janbowman.77@facebook.com

Entry # 200 - "A Well-Lived Life"

Not only is today Valentine's Day, but today marks Entry # 200 for my Writer's Blog. 

Off Coast of Scotland - May 2012

I was thinking about what is essential for a well-lived life and what do writers need in order to do their best work. After all, there are easier ways to live in the world than to be a writer. 

Not only do writers need a room of their own, that is, a special place where they can think and dream in solitude as they write, but they also need a social and emotional support system in order to produce their best work, because the writer's life has a steady supply of rejections and failures that can chip away at the soul. Support systems include a chorus of friends and fellow writers who bring essential encouragement, and if we are lucky, a supportive partner who understands what it is we are trying to do.

We all deserve loving, supportive people in our lives. Having a supportive, loving relationship certainly has helped me grow as a writer and as a person.

Jeanne - May 2012

My partner understands my quirks and forgives when necessary.  We are both better people together than when we were alone. We keep each other sane and secure. And that security provides emotional freedom that deepens our capacity to give and receive in a balanced loving life. We don't complete each other, rather our life together allows us to better experience and explore our own individual wholeness.

Part of being a writer involves coming to terms with the mismatch that often exists between the beauty of what we can almost imagine and what we find in stark reality on the page when we transmit images to words. 

I find comfort in this quote from Ann Patchett's craft essays in The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing & Life. Patchett says that "Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of the imagination for the stark disappointment of words . . . on the flat surface of a page."   

"And we need all the loving support we can find," Jan says.

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About Jan Bowman

Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award, Jan's stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best American Short Stories, and a Pen/O’Henry award.  Glimmer Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Awards for New Writers.

A recent story was a finalist for the 2013 Broad River Review RASH Award for Fiction, another story was a 2013 finalist in the Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest.  Jan’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others.   She is working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection, Mermaids & Other Stories.  She has nonfiction publications in Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and publishers.   Learn more at: www.janbowmanwriter.com or  visit blog:  http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Facebook:  janbowman.77@facebook.com

Entry # 199 - "Winter Leaves His Footprints"

Winter 2014 - ARGH!

Winter has left his footprints all over my garden. When I took this photo of my front garden this week I felt so discouraged and yes, even depressed. If I didn't know better, I would think my garden would never recover from the intense cold and brutal ice of the past weeks, and this winter is only at the mid-point.

I remind myself that this fallow ground is temporary and necessary for the health of the plants. Spring and summer will bring renewal. Tending a garden is quite a lot like writing. Parallels abound.

Summer 2013 - Nice!

In Wade Graham's nonfiction book, American Eden, Graham says, that those who create a garden draw a map of their mind on the ground. It occurs to me that designing a garden and working for its survival is not unlike dreaming a story that exists only in the imagination.  We attempt to dream what is possible and make it real. Our gardens, like our writing, are tempered sometimes by the events beyond our immediate control, and yet we can work to exert influence upon the results, because we have hope that our inner vision will prevail.

Graham says that our gardens are meaningful. They say a lot and we can read them as stories not only about their makers, but also about ourselves as a culture. He says that we ask our gardens "to speak for us, often assigning them certain lines in the play that we write about ourselves that we are hesitant to utter in our own voices. The drama of self-creation isn't straightforward, but rather it is full of diversions, deviations, dodges and impersonations."

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Vision Gives Hope - July 2013

About Jan Bowman

Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award, Jan's stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best American Short Stories, and a Pen/O’Henry award.  Glimmer Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Awards for New Writers.

A recent story was a finalist for the 2013 Broad River Review RASH Award for Fiction, another story was a 2013 finalist in the Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest.  Jan’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others.   She is working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection, Mermaids & Other Stories.  She has nonfiction publications in Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and publishers.   Learn more at: www.janbowmanwriter.com or  visit blog:  http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Facebook:  janbowman.77@facebook.com