Workshop Members Talk About the Weekly Workshops...

 The most valuable experience of my adult life... Linda Rizzotto

     "I started with Emily many years ago and when I reflect on where I started and where I am now I know that the journey I have taken with her is the most valuable experience of my adult life. Emily invited me into this place where I dare to peel away my defenses, a little at a time, until what is left is the core of what makes me me. It is alive, it throbs with passion and anger, it can feel sorrow and elation; it lives and breathes because it is me. And the only reason I know that this part of me exists is because Emily encouraged, cajoled, bullied and strengthened me to trust her, follow her down the path to my creativity and then she stood aside and let me try it on my own.

    Emily is sensitive to the fragility of opening up to one's creativity and although group members might come and go, always I have felt safe and nurtured. 

The angel, bright or dark, must be conjured before words can attach... 
                                                                                Kurt Blankmeyer        

Emily's peculiar genius is helping fiction writers to find, feed, wrestle and live with their demons or muses. Where do my stories and characters come from, how do they take shape in me, how can I allow and at the same times manage, their release onto the unfriendly, staring page? These are the kinds of questions we tale tellers "work on" at these "work shops." The angel, bright or dark, must be conjured before words can truly attach.

    In each of us flows a river, pooling at times into a sea, other times running swift, jagged, dangerous, tossing up boulders, murdering canoes. Gathering and surging, this water of the soul is neither channeled nor bound by a neat "process." Yet there are means, or a least knowings, recognitions, by which it may be transformed, with its traffic and debris, mud and reflected sky, rainbow-scaled fishes and bobbing sow corpses, into a kind of art. These important matters, along with standard writer's gear, we ruminate and alchemize around the table at Emily's, high on Turkey Mountain.

 

In one thirty minute session, Emily hit on what was wrong... 
                                                                           Angela Tehaan Leone

In one thirty minute listening session, Emily had hit on what I suspected was wrong with my fiction writing but had never been told and had never been able to articulate for myself. She presented her belief that a writer has to be willing to dive into the "creative unconscious" in order to come up with the material that makes people laugh and cry and sigh over a piece of fiction. Emily led me to the edge of the swimming pool, gave me a nudge and said, 'Jump in." I floundered for a while, but she and the group members were there with support and struggles of their own to report. Slowly, I began to see that I was writing fiction from an entirely new perspective. The process now feels as if I were a sea gull swooping down closer and closer to the prize that awaits me under the water below.