A Time to Write

Hooray! Just four more days, and my mom and I will be in Iowa City for the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival! Mom and I are just going for the weekend, and that means I will get to write all day Saturday and Sunday! (I will be returning in July for a week long workshop, but I’ll write more about that next month.) Mom is taking the Art of the Interview workshop while I will be in The Art of the Anecdote. We decided to divide and conquer, so it’s almost like I’ll be taking two workshops at once.

I pulled my registration and letters out thte other night in order to refresh my memory on the exact details of what exactly I signed up for way back in March. Yep, still excited about this workshop! Shannon Olson, my instructor, writes in her introductory letter that she “built [The Art of the Anecdote] on the premise that a lot of great writing has come from small sources, those brief anecdotes that we share with friends and family,” and I will learn how to “bring to life small personal moments and shape them into something that means more.” I will be reading pieces by Erma Bombeck, Garrison Keillor, Jim Heynen, David Sedaris and others to learn just how the anecdote can work.

With all the little interactions my co-workers and I have with our visitors and each other at Living History Farms, I figure I should have enough little incidents to write about for a long time! Speaking of little incidents, during my two and three-year-old Sunday school class this morning I learned that one of my little guys only wants to be called Super Man and wont answer to his actual name. Hmmmm… I wonder what I could turn that into! I’ll have to keep it in the back of my mind for this weekend.