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Alamo Bay = Total Success

7/27/2013

View from the venue: Sunset over Austin

It’s been a week now since Alamo Bay Writers’ Workshop, and I’m going to brag: it was a total total smashing success!

The participants were skilled, learned, funny, articulate, cool, and possessed of touching poems and stories. Fellow instructors Diane Wilson, Larry Heinemann, and Lee Grue were terrific. Pam Booton's organizing skills were/are incredible. The venue was fantastic.

Everything was great. And next year will be even better.

These people are waiting for me to say something....

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Writers Need Soft Eyes

7/11/2013

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This man has soft eyes. You need soft eyes, too.

The Wire gets my vote for the best show in TV history. It’s a brilliant work on so many, many levels, and it’s full of—yes, wisdom.

In the Season Four episode “Soft Eyes,” Bunk condescendingly lectures Kima on what to look for at a crime scene. He says she’s going to need soft eyes:

If you got soft eyes, you can see the whole thing. If you got hard eyes—you staring at the same tree, missing the forest.

It’s a wonderful character line, full of wisdom that we writers can appropriate for our own use.

A writer needs soft eyes. Right? Right. Of course. A writer needs soft vision that that embraces the world, caresses the world, acknowledges all the pain and beauty and mystery and despair and loneliness and happiness that exists in the world. You’re a writer with hard eyes? Your vision is going to ricochet off whatever you might think you’re looking at—it’s going to bounce away, deflect, reflect—you might as well be blind. You’re not going to see with hard eyes. You’re not going to understand.

We have to work to develop soft eyes. For some people this is difficult, for some it is easy. But seeing softly is always a deliberate act. This is one of the things I’ll be talking about at Alamo Bay Writers’ Workshop next week….

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Alamo Bay Writers' Workshop and Summer Fun

7/5/2013

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Alamo Bay is two weeks away right now and you all need to go to the website and register.

Alamo Bay Writers’ Workshop: http://www.alamobaywritersworkshop.com/

It’s going to be really good—Environmental Activist Diane Wilson will be teaching a creative nonfiction session, National Book Award-winning novelist Larry Heinemann will lead a fiction session, NEA Fellow Lee Grue will teach poetry, and I’ll lead a fiction session. We’ll be in Austin, Texas July 19-21. Register--

Today I have been watching the people next door. It’s a long holiday weekend—and the neighbors are having fun! They were out on their boat all day, then came back and changed clothes and went out to dinner.

I’m an academic and a writer. Summer is a work time for me—I am revising one book and beginning two (!) others. I made corrections on the proof of Professed and I'm thinking of ways to promote it. Plus thinking about the classes I’ll teach in the fall at PSU—plus thinking about the session I’ll lead at ABWW.

But…all that’s fun, too. That's what summer is for.

Doing some last revisions on this book. It's almost ready to send out....

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Ordinary Horrors

Alamo Bay = Total Success

Writers Need Soft Eyes

Alamo Bay Writers' Workshop and Summer Fun

Lowell Mick White

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