Monthly Archives: October 2015

Happy Halloween, Writers!

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MonsterMash2

Happy Halloween, Writers & Fiends!  To kick off the the Day of the Dead, we here at the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop are getting our quills ready for NaNoWriMo 2015!  November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and our CWW staff is up for an exciting writing challenge! We have the entire month of November to write draft, sketch, and complete the first versions of our novels.  The goal is to get to over 50,000 words by November 30.  We at the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop are working on our novel projects a little bit everday.  For food for thought and writing inspiration, we’re turning into @NaNoWriMo, @NaNoWordSprints, and all the amazing writers participating in #NaNoWriMo on Twitter!  During the month of November 2015, we’re going to be working on book-length manuscripts.  Writers are invited to work on novels, short story collections, nonfiction and poetry manuscripts, essays, and plays during the month of November!

If you’d like to join us for NaNoWriMo, please sign up on the NaNoWriMo website and join us on the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop NING Membership Network!  You can post a short summary of your book project on our CWW Membership site, check out our weekly prompts, and cheer each other on as we write our book-length manuscripts during the month of November!

xo, The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop

BitchBoys

CWW Instructor Jessica Reidy nominated for Best of the Net

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Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Instructor, Jessica Reidy, recently had her poem “Transfiguration of the Black Madonna: Gypsy Goddess, Gypsy Saint” nominated by The Infoxicated Corner of The The Poetry Blog for “Best of the Net.”  Check out the other nominees here!

Transfiguration of the Black Madonna (excerpted from Zenith)

Gypsy Goddess; Gypsy Saint
Black Madonna, full of snakes, let your crescent down. Wield the sickle, rush the milk, and salt the serpents’ mouths. Golden bangles, black milk snakes—these adorn your arms. Blue sky cloth cut for (you) Sarah, Sarah Black, Madonna Shadow, cut for goddess saint of wanderers, cut predestined, cut of chaos, cut the star palm bowls. Slip the feathers under scales and reform the body whole. You were a slave who sailed the chasm, sailed the sea and sun. Persecution sprang a river from the monster: milk, and spit, and blood. In the monster lived a woman and the woman’s soul—you wore her face and wore her tresses spun from black snake gold—golden teeth and golden brow, golden tail and root. The milk snakes split their nests and fled and now your mouth is ruined. There is no birth, there is no death, there’s only mutant growth, and milk snakes dyeing Sarah’s skin with heaps and heaps of gold. There is no sickle there is no moon, there is no blood or salt. There’s only Sarah sailing through the dream in which she’s caught.

Jessica will be teaching alongside Diana Norma Szkoloyai (writing faculty) and Elissa Lewis (yoga faculty) at our upcoming Thanksgiving Cleanse Writing & Yoga Retreat at Sacred Sounds in Greenwich Village, NYC. The retreat runs from 2-4 on Saturday November 21st and 2-4 on Sunday November 22nd, and is packed with both writing and craft classes and yoga classes. Registration is currently $30 per day in advance or $35 on the day of the workshop. The workshops will be different each day, and we’d love to have you with us for the whole weekend!

Jessica ReidyJessica Reidy attended Florida State University for her MFA in Fiction and earned her B.A. from Hollins University. Her work is Pushcart-nominated and has appeared in Narrative Magazine as Short Story of the Week, The Los Angeles Review, The Missouri Review, and other journals. She’s a staff-writer and the Outreach Editor for Quail Bell Magazine, Managing Editor for VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, Art Editor for The Southeast Review, and Visiting Professor for the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop retreats. She teaches creative writing and is a certified yoga instructor and Reiki Master. Jessica also works her Romani (Gypsy) family trades, fortune telling, energy healing, and dancing. Jessica is currently writing her first novel set in post-WWII Paris about Coco Charbonneau, the half-Romani burlesque dancer and fortune teller of Zenith Circus, who becomes a Nazi hunter.  You can learn more at www.jessicareidy.com.

My Elizabeths: A Biographer and Her Subjects (November 17, 2015 | 4:15 PM)

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In a talk that touches on issues of craft, narrative, and inspiration, the biographer Megan Marshall (’77, RI ’07) will discuss her work on past and current subjects, including Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Hawthorne, and Elizabeth Peabody. She is the recipient of many awards, such as the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, and a Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

The lecture will be held at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University in the Sheerr Room of Fay House (10 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138).

This event is free and open to the public.

For more information, visit http://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2015-megan-marshall-lecture.

Welcome the new Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Interns!

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The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is proud to announce our new interns for Fall/Winter 2015!  Here are some of the talented writers, students, and graphic designers who will be joining our team:

Alyssa3Alyssa Goldstein Ekstrom is from Queens, New York and is one of the newest editing and communication interns for the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Currently a freelance court reporter, she has in the past written for The Wave of Long Island, a weekly newspaper. She has her bachelor’s degree in Media Studies from CUNY Queens College and enjoys writing poetry as well as fiction.

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Casey Lynch is an Editing and Communications intern for the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop.  She hails from Needham, MA and is currently a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania.  She studies English, Creative Writing, and Urban Education, and hopes to write and teach in the future.

 
 

Emily Teitsworth is from Rochester, New York, and is currently a junior at Susquehanna University. She is working on a dual Bachelors degree in Creative Writing and Publishing/Editing, with a minor in Public Relations. She has previously interned for AdmitSee.com, Writer’s and Books, and the publishing program coordinator at her school. She has been on the staff of Sanctuary magazine for a year and a half, and will be editor-in-chief during her senior year. She has had poetry published in Stone Canoe and keeps a blog about her time abroad in Scotland this fall. She is also in the process of putting together a book of poetry, as well as a fantasy novel.

Podcast Live for Shakespeare & Co. Reading feat. David Shields and Charles Recoursé

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During our 2015 Summer in Paris Writing Retreat, the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop organized a reading at the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore.  The reading featured acclaimed essayist, writer, and Cambridge Writers’ Workshop instructor David Shields, who read from his new book I Think You’re Totally Wrong with Charles Recoursé, who is an editor for Au Diable Vauvert and Shields’s French translator.  Following an introduction by CWW Creative Director Rita Banerjee, the two read select passages from I Think You’re Totally Wrong with Recourse’ reenacting the part of Caleb Powell, Shields’s co-author.  The reading was followed by a Q&A and a book signing outside the store.

A full podcast of the reading is now available on the Shakespeare & Co. SoundCloud.  And additional photos from the event can also be found on the Shakespeare and Co. Website.

– Alex Carrigan