"Listing: Side to Side, Top to Bottom — Tips and Techniques for Writing Every Day"
with Nathan Brown
Learn how to never be caught without something to write about. Many writers, from Dickens to Twain, and Hemingway on up to Stephen King, had (or have) a daily writing practice. And the writers who’ve written or talked about it seem to say that this discipline was their ‘great teacher’ when it comes to the craft. I’ve written a poem a day for the last fourteen years, and I can say that nothing has taught me more about writing. We will explore:
- Ways to generate material and organize it into “themes”
- Techniques for getting a daily writing practice up and running
- How to maintain it through “bite-sized” blocks of time and output
Nathan Brown is an author, songwriter, and award-winning poet living in Wimberley, Texas. He holds a PhD in English and Journalism from the University of Oklahoma where he taught for seventeen years. He served as Poet Laureate for the State of Oklahoma in 2013/14, and now travels fulltime performing readings and concerts, teaching workshops, and speaking on creativity, poetry, songwriting, and creative writing.
Nathan has published roughly eighteen books. Most recent are An Honest Day’s Ode; Apocalypse Soon: The Mostly Unedited Poems of Ezra E. Lipschitz; and Don’t Try, a collection of co-written poems with Austin Music Hall of Fame songwriter, Jon Dee Graham. Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award. His earlier book, Two Tables Over, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award.
He’s taught memoir, songwriting, performance, and creativity workshops for the Sisters Folk Festival in Oregon, the Taos Poetry Festival, the Woody Guthrie Festival, the Everwood Farmstead Foundation in Wisconsin, as well as Blue Rock Artist Ranch near Austin, Texas.
Naomi Shihab Nye said about Nathan’s book, My Salvaged Heart: “Brave new world! The sizzle of couplings and uncouplings – attraction and romance, ineffable magnetism, mysterious as ever – but doused with a savory dose of Nathan Brown humor, a tilted long-ranging eye that sees the next bend in the road even when he’s standing right here, firmly planted.”
The Writers Guild of Texas presents Guest Speaker / Program meetings on the 3rd Monday of each month in the Basement Program room of the Richardson Public Library. Visitors are welcome to attend.