Tag: Ginnah Howard

Writers Retreat Workshops

Ann Voorhees Baker 2022 Workshops , , , ,
Writers Retreat Workshops

At the Women At Woodstock Writers Retreat, we welcome women bloggers, memoirists, fiction writers, poets, and nonfiction writers of all levels and any age. Our content-rich retreat offers two tracks: Track 1 - The Writers Colony, and Track 2 - The Workshop Intensive.

You have your choice of either track at the retreat - it's up to you which you choose.

Options For Everyone

For everyone at the Writing Retreat, there will be workshops and writing time during the day. In the evenings we'll gather for an Evening Salon of cheese and wine (or beverage of your choice) and readings, sharing what we wish from the day's work.

- REGISTER NOW -

Track 1 / The Writers Colony

You will start each day with a morning workshop taught by resident writing coach Ginnah Howard and then the day will be open for you to write, think, and map out your writing future without interruption, surrounded by other writing women also pursuing their own creative quests. Prior to the retreat you will have been invited to submit a manuscript up to 20 pages for Ginnah to read and critique. During the retreat, you will have the opportunity to schedule a one-on-one session with Ginnah to review your manuscript and receive individual coaching regarding your work and the process of getting published.

Lifebridge Sanctuary main lodge - back
Lifebridge Sanctuary Garden House

Track 2 / The Workshop Intensive

Each day you will join in an intensive full-morning writing workshop with resident writing coach Susan Hodara, where a safe space will be created for you to write and practice your developing skills with prompts, discussions, and short writing sessions, concentrating on your own life experiences and writing mainly in memoir. After a long break for thought, lunch, and maybe a walk outdoors, you'll reconvene in the afternoon for a second writing workshop to continue where you left off.

Faculty

Ginnah Howard - The Writers Colony (Track 1)

Ginnah HowardGinnah Howard's work has appeared in Water~Stone Review, Permafrost, Portland Review, Descant 145, Eleven Eleven Journal, The Tusculum Review, and elsewhere. Several stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Night Navigation, Book 2 of her upstate novel trilogy, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Chronogram called Book 3, Doing Time Outside (Standing Stone Books, 2013), “a beautiful read.”  Book 1 of the trilogy, Rope & Bone: A Novel in Stories (Illume, 2014) was listed by Publishers Weekly as one of the “best of the best” Indie books of 2015. In her latest book, I’m Sick of This Already: At-Risk Learning in a High School Class, Howard focuses on a year of working with students in a small rural town. For further information, visit www.GinnahHoward.com

As an author who has participated in and facilitated many critique workshops, Ginnah Howard has an experienced and critical eye. She will do a close reading of your manuscript, concentrating on what’s “working” and what still needs to be developed or revised, This critique will provide objective, thoughtful consideration of how a writer can improve her manuscript and make it more attractive to literary agents and publishers. Beyond the review of your 20-page writing sample that you will submit to Ginnah before our retreat, if you have a full-length manuscript that you feel is ready for this kind of editing, email ghoward@GinnahHoward.com for a detailed description of what would be included in a book-length manuscript critique. You will have time to meet with Ginnah individually during the writers retreat for review of your work and guidance you as you write and refine and mold your work toward publishable shape.

Ginnah will teach a daily morning workshop for the Writers Colony track of the Writers Retreat, for women who have a work in progress or who want to write intensively on a new project for the weekend under the guidance of a writing coach, who will advise on all aspects of writing and finishing a completed manuscript and readying it for publication.

The Writers Colony track will have two parts:

(1) three morning workshop sessions with participants volunteering to read a few pages of their works-in-progress out loud, with time given to talk about each piece to help the writer consider what revision may be needed. We will also discuss craft using excerpts from the group’s favorite authors.

(2) an individual conference with Ginnah on one of the afternoons to discuss your submitted manuscript (up to 20 pages of fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction or poetry) that you will email-attach to her no later than two weeks prior to the workshop. Before our retreat, Ginnah will contact you by email with more information about all the above.

Ginnah will be available to meet with every track attendee individually to review and critique a sample of her writing and discuss avenues to getting published.

Susan Hodara - The Workshop Intensive (Track 2)

Are you inspired to record the transforming events of your life? Are you drawn to translate your most vivid memories into writing? Are you driven to shape your experiences into well-crafted and poignant memoirs? This workshop offers a supportive environment where participants will write, share their writing with the class, receive constructive feedback, and have the chance to rewrite and revise as desired. We will address topics such as the (un)reliability of memory, the creation of sensory scenes, the challenges of revisiting the past, and the importance of adhering to the truth.

Susan Hodara is a memoirist, teacher, and journalist. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Communication Arts, and more. Her short memoirs are published in various anthologies and literary journals, and she is a co-author of the collaborative memoir Still Here Thinking Of You: A Second Chance With Our Mothers (Big Table Publishing, 2013). She is a highly sought-after teacher of creative and nonfiction writing, and has taught ongoing memoir workshops at the Hudson Valley Writers Center since 2009.

Click here to visit Susan's website.

When & Where

Our Writers Retreat is live and in person!

Saturday, October 15, 2022 - Wednesday, October 19, 2022

3 WAW Writer Alums Broadcast, Published & Recognized in One Month!

Ann Voorhees Baker 0 Comment Ann's Blog, Creatives & Creativity, WAW Community News , , , , , ,
3 WAW Writer Alums Broadcast, Published & Recognized in One Month!

It's True What They Say

It's said all the time - that if you want to succeed as a writer, you must join a writing group, share your work, and give and get support from your fellow writers.
 
Well, damned if it isn't true.
 
We writers who've shared our work and our dreams at the Women At Woodstock Writers Retreats tend to hang together all year long; to send new work out for comments and critiques, to listen to one another's struggles with a story or memoir, to share news of publishing opportunities, to bitch and moan, and above all to encourage each other to keep on writing our stories.
 
And look what happened:
 
Three Women At Woodstock Writers Retreat alums got: broadcast, published, and recognized, all in the same month!
 

Ginnah HowardGinnah Howard

Ginnah, our fearless leader of Track 1 of our Writers Retreat, performed a reading of "Tupperware Story," an excerpt from her novel Rope & Bone, A Novel in Stories as part of a podcast aired on "The Strange Recital."  See below for a teaser and a link to the podcast.
 

Ann StoneyAnn Stoney

Ann's short story, "Soldiers and Lovers" was placed on the "Highly Commended" list for the Sean O'Faolain International Short Story prize. The competition is sponsored by the Munster Literature Center in Cork, Ireland. Just 32 stories were selected from 900 entries. Although the story has yet to be published, it's quite an honor to be selected for the list.

Ann Voorhees BakerAnn Voorhees Baker

Ann's (yes, that's me) short story, "Midnight In the Garden of Sid and Eva," will be published in the fall edition of the Chicago Quarterly Review. This is her second short story publication this year; her first, "Changing Lanes" was published last spring in the Noyo River Review. Ann also was awarded a one-week writer's residency this coming spring at the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
motorcycle - Rope & Bone illus(From Rope & Bone, A Novel in Stories by Ginnah Howard.)  Originally published in Square Lake as "Circling-'84"
Other things are on my mind when the Tupperware lady says, “First, let’s move your couch over by the door and the table here.”
 
Before her words reach my brain, she’s got one end of that maroon monster, a cast-off from Steve’s mother, waist high and swinging away from the wall. Vaguely I register the crap underneath: a package of zig-zags, a pizza crust, a dried puddle of something.
 
“Get under it good,” she directs.
 
And just like that, I’ve got the other end up. I believe in those mothers who lift cars to free trapped children.
 
“You know,” she says, as she backs me toward the corner, “a successful Tupperware party doesn’t just happen; it has to be orchestrated.”
 
This is what they all keep telling me: all those teachers all those years, the judge, last week. Like it can all be organized into an outline:
 
I. Get Straight
    A. Your Drawers
    B. Your Life
 
"Okay," the Tupperware lady says, "put it down right there."
 
As I'm trying to remember what comes next 1. or a., she says, "While you you get the vacuum, I'll start clearing the records off the table. They'll be here in an hour."
 
    a. Radically change
      1. Do what other mothers do
 
It's this kind of outline thinking that got me into having a Tupperware party in the first place. Me, Carla Morletti, once a distinguished member of the Pagans Motorcycle Club Women's Auxiliary, taking directions from this middle-class matron in a flowered shirtwaist in my own living room...
 

New Kudos for Ginnah Howard’s Works

Ann Voorhees Baker 0 Comment Ann's Blog, WAW Community News , , , ,

Here’s some impressive news about one of our Women At Woodstock presenters; author Ginnah Howard, who will be leading our Writers Colony (Track I) at the Women At Woodstock Writers Retreat this coming fall:

George Hovis, the author of The Skin Artist (Southern Fried Chicken, 2019) just posted the following review of Ginnah’s novel Rope & Bone, on Goodreads. There’s nothing better than having a respected author sing praises to your work, is there? 

Here’s George’s review:

Rope & Bone: A Novel in Stories
by Ginnah Howard (Goodreads Author)

This remarkable novel of stories recounts the friendship of two strong women, Del and Carla, as they choose mates, lose mates, and navigate the challenges of single motherhood. Ginnah Howard has that rare gift of illuminating life moment by moment, showing us how, often, fate can turn upon a choice as simple as choosing to feed a lover’s dogs rather than giving a daughter the attention she needs. As with Alice Munro’s, Howard’s stories somehow create a sense that the stakes are always enormously high without ever seeming to depend upon plot. Yet, plot is there in every breath these characters take, from planning a Tupperware party to attending an AA meeting. Ginnah Howard’s characters live on every page!

Ginnah Howard

Ann Voorhees Baker 0 Comment Ann's Blog, People at WAW 2019, Writers at WAW 2019 , , ,

Ginnah Howard‘s work has appeared in Water~Stone Review, Permafrost, Portland Review, Descant 145, Eleven Eleven Journal, The Tusculum Review, and elsewhere. Several stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Night Navigation, Book 2 of her upstate novel trilogy, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Chronogram called Book 3, Doing Time Outside (Standing Stone Books, 2013), “a beautiful read.”  Book 1 of the trilogy, Rope & Bone: A Novel in Stories (Illume, 2014) was listed by Publishers Weekly as one of the “best of the best” Indie books of 2015. In her latest book, I’m Sick of This Already: At-Risk Learning in a High School Class, Howard focuses on a year of working with students in a small rural town. For further information, visit GinnahHoward.com

We’re very happy that Ginnah will be returning this year to teach a daily morning workshop for the Writers in Process track of the Writers Retreat, for women who have a work in progress and want to write intensively for the weekend under the guidance of a writing coach, who will advise on all aspects of writing and finishing a completed manuscript and readying it for publication.

Author Ginnah Howard Is Offering Private Manuscript Critique Service to WAW Writers

Ann Voorhees Baker 0 Comment Ann's Blog, Guest Posts, WAW Community News , ,
Last year author Ginnah Howard came to the Women At Woodstock Writers Retreat and shared an illuminating hour with us – about the books she’s published, about the process of writing, about how she was able to define herself as a writer, and how it is to live a writer’s life. It was one of my favorite hours of the whole week. She lead the Writers In Process track at the Women At Woodstock 2018 Writers Retreat and is return, by popular request, in 2019.
 
I’ve read Ginnah’s trilogy of books, Rope & Bone, Night Navigation (a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice), and Doing Time Outside. These are but a few of the works that she’s published. I admire her work tremendously. I’m so glad that, through the women I’ve met over the years at Women At Woodstock, I was able to cross paths with this respected author.
 
Ginnah just told me about a manuscript critiquing service she offers, and I asked her if she would give me details. Below is her description of how she goes about working with writers who have manuscripts underway. Please click on the link at the end to learn more about Ginnah’s process, her rates, her credentials, and how you can work with her.
 

Manuscript Critiques

Ginnah HowardDo you have a novel, memoir or creative nonfiction manuscript ready for an in depth critique?

As an author who has participated in and facilitated many critique workshops, I am now available to do a close reading of your manuscript. My reading will concentrate on what’s “working” and what still needs to be developed or revised: narrative tension, the ability to use scenes and tuck in back story to build a world that engages, use of a structure that effectively moves the story forward, the use of significant detail, the need for clarity and tightening…  This critique will provide objective, thoughtful consideration of how a writer can improve his or her manuscript and make it more attractive to literary agents and publishers.

If you have a full-length manuscript that you feel is ready for this kind of editing, I suggest that you read the attachment which includes a more detailed description of what would be included in a book-length manuscript critique, as well as a listing of the flat-rate fees depending on its length.

I also urge you to check out my author website, www.GinnahHoward.com, and my listings on Google which will give you links to work of mine that has been published in literary journals as well as access to reviews of my novels and a creative nonfiction book in the New York Times Book Review, The Washington Times, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Chronogram.

If you decide you are interested, please email me at ghoward@GinnahHoward.com to arrange to send me an attachment of the first chapter of your manuscript in order for me to do a free-of-charge critique to be followed by a phone call to talk about my comments. If you find that critique and conversation helpful, then you would send me an attachment of the entire manuscript. You would then sign a contract to insure payment and one-half of the fee, with my guarantee that the critiqued manuscript, with in-text comments, and a three-page discussion of areas which might be improved would be emailed to you by attachment within one month, to be followed by a 30 to 60 minute Skype or phone call follow-up to discuss my suggestions and address your questions.

~ Ginnah Howard

Becoming A Writer

Ann Voorhees Baker 0 Comment Guest Posts , , ,

by Ginnah Howard – Guest Blogger

What led me to start writing in my mid-forties, something I’d never considered doing before? The thrill of living alone for the first time in my life—that magic free-fall through all that empty space. My children were off on their own, and a friend loaned me her log cabin on a stretch of back road: no neighbors, no phone, a pump for water in the yard, an outhouse in back, a woodstove, and kerosene lamps for light. And our big dog, Butch. I taught English in a high school twenty miles away, but, in the evenings in the silence of “nothing I had to do,” I began to write.

That first fall, I often wrote while sitting on the porch. A few times a week a Harley Davidson would roar past, driven by a bearded man wearing a bandana, with a long-haired woman on the back. We’d wave, but it was a while before I knew who they were and that our children had gone to school together. I learned they’d been members of the Pagan Motorcycle Club in California who now kept an album of newspaper clippings of Pagan arrests on their coffee table. I loved to visit them, to take it all in.

If I hadn’t met this family, I might never have started that long process of learning the craft of fiction, the deletion of pages of stuff that did not work. Using one true fact from what was for me an exotic world, I tried to make up stories. Though I was an English teacher, a person who had loved to read all my life, I knew almost nothing about writing scenes, about point of view, about narrative tension. Using material from this family and my own life, I wrote one hundred pages of stories. I then went to a one week workshop at Skidmore. The author, Lynne Barrett, taught a class titled “How to Write a Short Story.” She talked about the need to begin the story in the middle—in medias res and showing instead of telling. I threw away that first one hundred pages.

I wrote the first story that “worked” based on a true incident. I had gone to our little local grocery store and as I stepped out of the car, a man on a scaffold working on an old Inn across the street fixed me with an intense stare that made me uncomfortable. It turned out he was on a work-crew from the area correctional facility. When I left the store, I bowed my head and scurried to my car. A few hours later my motorcycle friend went to the store to buy cigarettes. When the man gave her the eye, she waved back and thus began a daily staring match between her and the prisoner as she sat on the bench in front of the store pretending to read the paper. This contrast between these two women’s responses to danger formed one of the cores of the thirty-four stories that eventually became Rope & Bone. And it offered that great learning experience for me as a beginning writer: How to turn the real experiences of my own life into fiction and how to deeply imagine the motorcycle world family fully and convincingly enough to make that world real.

I kept at it to finish Rope & Bone: A Novel in Stories and two other novels, Night Navigation and Doing Time Outside, about these same two families to complete an upstate trilogy. What a long, strange, and thrilling trip it’s been.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ginnah Howard’s work has appeared in Water~Stone Review, Permafrost, Portland Review, Descant 145, Eleven Eleven Journal, The Tusculum Review, and elsewhere. Several stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Night Navigation, Book 2 of her upstate novel trilogy, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Chronogram called Book 3, Doing Time Outside (Standing Stone Books), “a beautiful read.”  The first book of the trilogy, Rope & Bone: A Novel in Stories (Illume) was listed by Publishers Weekly as one of the “best of the best” Indie books of 2015. In her latest book, I’m Sick of This Already: At-Risk Learning in a High School Class, Howard focuses on a year of working with students in a small rural town. Currently she is putting together a collection of poetry and prose titled An Opera of Hankering. To learn more, visit: www.GinnahHoward.com

Ginnah Howard will be the visiting author at the Women At Woodstock Writers Retreat on Nov 2nd.