Story Makers Show

Rhona Berens is a life coach extraordinaire. We should know--we’ve worked with her, as have many “creatives.” She’s also got a background in film, screenwriting and writing for television, and writes poetry and other forms as well--so she was the perfect guest for Story Makers. She laid out some key ideas about prioritization, and explained “saboteurs”--the parts of ourselves that bring voices of fear and judgement into our lives and art--and how to work with them. We discussed how to make your intuitive a voice as powerful and heard as the voices of your fear and negative consequences. Listening to the voice that says, “I’ve got a story to tell” and some tools to support that voice to thrive. At the end of the episode we touched on subtext. If you are ready to transform your relationship to your creativity, your writing, your story making, or the necessary self-promotion, this is the episode for you.

Links and Books Discussed:

Einstein's Cosmos

Rhona's website is http://www.fortedreams.com/

Link to article by Rhona about how to remove some roadblocks to promoting ourselves as writers: http://bit.ly/1MRnHQv

Rhona presents her bio as stories about herself, and they are each wonderful and add more to the last, so check out this conversation and her website if you want to know more beyond:

My Professional Story (a.k.a. What Some of the Letters After My Name Mean): My degrees from McGill University and UCLA are in Communications & Media Studies. I worked at UC-Irvine for close to a decade, where I earned tenure, chaired my department, served as Director of the Professional Film & TV Internship Program, and taught a range of courses, like Performance in Film & TV.

I eventually left academia for business and held VP posts in Strategic Marketing at Online Partners; Client Services & Customer Care at PlanetOut Partners; and Business & Community Development at PeoplesMD. I've also worked as a Business Consultant focused on customer experience.  What are the favorite roles I played in this part of my story? Teacher, mentor, advisor, which lead me to...

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

The wonderfully named Indigo Moore is three artists in one--at least. He’s a poet and a playwright who is now writing the screenplay for a play that was optioned for film. (Not to mention that he’s got a high-tech day job we talk about a little bit.) He’s also an editor--and we were sure to get that perspective on submission and what he learned as a writer from editing.When we caught up with him, he was also writing a new play on commission, and we talked about having that kind of external deadline, the art of submitting, as well as the different mindsets required for different genres. He described playwriting as a language-driven medium, as compared to the image-driven medium of poetry. In addition to laying out the process of calling or stripping a poem, he gave us a terrific description of a scene that you might see in a novel and how it would be written for a play and then how to make that same scene imagistic and wordless in a screenplay. Since writing is rewriting, we also looked at revision in different genres. We also got into following the character and trusting the process. He urged us to hunting inspiration down with a stick rather than sitting around and waiting for it.

Books/ Authors/ Artists/ Screenplays Discussed:

Henry Dumas

Indigo Moor is a poet, playwright, and author with 12 years’ experience teaching creative writing. His second book of poetry, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem Prize. His first book, Tap-Root, was published as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series.

Three of his short plays, Harvest, Shuffling, and The Red and Yellow Quartet debuted at the 60 Million Plus Theatre’s Spring Playwright’s festival. His full-length stageplay, Live! at the Excelsior, was a finalist for the Images Theatre Playwright Award has been optioned for a full length film.

Indigo is an honors’ graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program, where he studied poetry, fiction, and scriptwriting. In addition, he is a graduate member of the Artist's Residency Institute for Teaching Artists, former Vice President of the Sacramento Poetry Center, and a distinguished Cave Canem alumni.

An engineer by trade, Indigo emphasizes ingraining elements of poetry as tools for the writer’s arsenal. His students learn the “how” as well as the “why” of effective poetry, enabling the individual to better understand how their own work can be refined. Indigo encourages emphasis on the conciseness that drives powerful, evocative poetry.

Indigo received the 2005 Vesle Fenstermaker Prize for Emerging Writers and the 2008 Jack Kerouac Poetry contest. Other honors include: 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist finishes for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Crab Orchard First Book Prize, Saturnalia First Book Award, Naomi Long Madgett Book Award, and WordWorks Prize.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

"I don't get stuck," Jillian Lauren says. She tackles resistance. Pray to write the most mediocre page, she told us. Write through your writer’s block. Jillian Lauren is a superstar. She’s written two bestselling memoirs and a novel, as well as an ongoing, award-winning mommy blog. We caught up with her at the launch of her tour for Everything You Ever Wanted. She gave terrific, clear insight into the process of finding an arc of your memoir, pinpointing the character shift and the moment that exemplifies that shift, and handling leaps in time deftly. We comiserated about the pain of reading your old journals, and she had an excellent tip for that, too. She showed us how to create a time map for your memoir, when to show and when to tell, and what it means to write through the body. In terms of structure, we talked about specific underlying forms and how to find the beginning. Jillian has a “board of directors”--the readers she trusts to read her drafts. She talks about when to show the work and what to show to whom. She inspired us with a frank look at honesty, rigor and self-reflection. “Art,” Jillian reminds us in a discussion of happy and unhappy endings, “is hopeful because it's an act of creation.”

Authors

Amy Hempel

Joan Didion

Maxine Hong Kingston

Allen Ginsberg

Rilke

Dostoyevsky

Nick Flynn

Jillian Lauren: I’m a writer, storyteller, mom, rock-wife, and Los Angeleno, by way of Jersey. I’m the New York Times bestselling author of the memoirs Everything You Ever Wanted, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem and the novel Pretty. Some Girls has been translated into 18 different languages and is currently being adapted for TV. I write a lot of essays and articles, some of which have been in The New York Times,The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine, Elle, The Daily Beast and Salon, among others. I speak and tell live stories, often with The Moth. Howard Stern interviewed me once and he was actually really nice! I did a Tedx talk about identity and adoption, in 2014 at Chapman University. I’m married to the musician Scott Shriner, and together we adopted our son Tariku from Ethiopia in 2009. We’ve slept a total of seven hours since.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

Christine is one of those overnight successes that is a decade in the making. Her essay about having a stroke at age thirty-three lead to a two-book contract: a memoir will be out in 2017 followed by a novel in 2018. She’s also a stellar presence on social media, one of those people you feel you’ve truly befriended because she’s so generous and funny and brilliant in her online personality, as in life. Speaking of social media, promotion in general was one of our topics.

Christine served as the fiction editor of Kartika Review, "a national literary arts magazine that publishes Asian Pacific Islander American fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and art," and she gave us tips from the submissions-receiving side of the long climb to publication. Hilarious and helpful.

We also talked about structure, omission and selection in writing memoir, asking your character who drives the book, character mischief, and character change in both fiction and memoir. We delved into the differences between journaling, blogging and memoir--as well as the author note itself. We considered the role of self-discovery and cribbing structure, and  the importance of Kurt Vonnegut.

Links

“I Had a Stroke at 33:” http://www.buzzfeed.com/xtinehlee/i-had-a-stroke-at-33#3zhfw3g

Kartika Review: http://kartikareview.com/

Christine has amazing bios, and offers a variety of versions. You can check them all out at her web site: http://www.christinehlee.com/

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee has a memoir (WHOLE 2017) and a novel (GOLEM OF SEOUL 2018), both of which are forthcoming from Ecco. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies such as ZYZZYVA, Guernica,The Rumpus, The New York Times, Hyphen Magazine, BuzzFeed, and Men Undressed.

Born in New York City, Christine earned her undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley and her MFA at Mills College. She has been awarded a residency at Hedgebrook, and her pieces have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and placed in competitions such as the Poets and Writers’ Magazine Writers Exchange Contest, Glimmer Train Fiction Open, and others.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

Boris is charismatic, one of those charming, larger-than-life, generous-hearted human beings who is also a brilliant writer. Together, we discussed procrastination and the pros and cons of writing under contract, as well as the worth of work that never got published. Boris features some of his rejected pieces on his web site; find out why. We compared journalism to fiction writing, outlining to surprise (or maps to headlights). We touched on burying your ideas in a propulsive story, the lightbulb moment and unhappy women . . . We got into structure and readers’ questions and what to do when you are stuck. Some tips included taking time off between drafts and retyping the manuscript. When is the story over? When the character has lost something and learned something. Boris will inspire and delight you. Trust us.

Books

Links

HD, poet

Paris review interviews

Boris received a degree in Russian literature from Princeton University. Afterward, he was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, and edited “Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier” (Random House). Boris received his MFA in fiction from New York University, and has received residencies and fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, among others.

His first novel, A Replacement Life (HarperCollins), was a front-cover review in The New York Times Book Review: “Is there room in American fiction for another brilliant young émigré writer? There had better be, because here he is. Boris Fishman’s first novel, “A Replacement Life,” is bold, ambitious and wickedly smart… The only problem with this novel is that its covers are too close together… Undoubtedly, comparisons will be made — to Bellow and the Roths (Henry and Philip)… [and] Bernard Malamud.”

It was also one of The New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2014; a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick; a best-of-2014 selection by The San Francisco Chronicle, Shakespeare & Co., and others; the winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal; a BuzzFeed 20-Under-40 Debut Writers selection; and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. It received raves from The New Yorker, NPR, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times,Newsweek, Publishers Weekly (starred review), MSN, Vogue, and others. His next, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, about a New Jersey couple that adopts a boy from Montana who turns out to be wild, will be out from HarperCollins on March 1, 2016.