“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”
― Vincent Van Gogh
You’re invited!
Winter 2024 From Heart to Paper Writing Workshop Live!
Classes: 10 Saturday Mornings Location: West Contra Costa Adult Education Alvarado School 5625 Sutter Ave Richmond, CA 94804
Dates: January 20, 2024 —March 30, 2024
Time: 10:00AM to 12:00PM Pacific Time
Fee: $143
Margaret C. Murray has been leading From Heart to Paper Writing Workshops for over a decade. A professional author and teacher, Margaret is presently preparing her most recent novel, Deer Xing, for publication. She is also the publisher of Writewords Press.
To read what her students say about the workshop, seeTestamonials.
Read more about Margaret C. Murray’s From Heart to Paper Writing Workshop below.
Tony Hillerman, famed mystery writer of the Southwest, wrote the above advice to me the last year before his death in 2008. We had been corresponding since before I published my novel of the ancient Anasazi of the Southwest, Sundagger.net. In a note to him, I had been complaining, whining really, about my writing life.
“Keep writing, stay heathy,” he wrote back. This is my mantra when I feel confused, at loose ends, or discouraged with my work.
I wonder if renown writer J. D. Salinger had taken this advice, he would have experienced life differently. When he died at 91 in 2010, Salinger was possibly the world’s most renown and most successful literary recluse. “Hermit Crab,” Time magazine dubbed him. Here was somebody who was up there with the Grammy winners in star power and prestige, yet seemed cursed with the dismal personality of old Scrooge.
Back in the ’60s when I read Catcher in the Rye, my teenage heart beat along with Holden Caulfield’s. I was the catcher, those sheep; I was the rye too. J.D. Salinger was my writing hero along with Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde and Dostoevsky (No females in that short list, alas, but that is another story.)
Unlike Tony Hillerman who wrote 29 mysteries set in Navajo country, Salinger wrote one novel, a phenomenal success that he disdained, and three small volumes of short stories–then nothing else for 45 years.
By all accounts, J.D. Salinger was a phenomenal writer who refused his success. Was he was sick with self-loathing of his own genius, his own work? He must have felt he had no choice. He must have done his best from inside the worm of his illness.
But he did take one piece of Tony Hillerman’s advice. His wives and daughters say he wrote all that time. What did he leave us? I am dying to read it. Maybe that’s all he wanted–fans dying to read him. Maybe that’s why he shunned his fame and adulation. To keep us hungry. Life is strange. What do you think?
Keep writing, stay healthy.
Thank you, Tony Hillerman.
“A flower is never opened with a hammer.” — motto of From Heart to Paper Writing Workshops
I have been teaching From Heart to Paper Writing Workshops for over seven years here in the San Francisco East Bay and begin each session with this motto.
You’d think I’d be tired of it by now, considering it old and worn out. Yet each time I say “A flower is never opened with a hammer”, I feel the power of the words, the exquisite truth of flowers, and the awe of seeing a flower open. I feel my heart leap with possibility— for myself and for my students who are like flowers too.
Writing workshops are upcoming in Winter and Spring, 2020.
Would you like to know more about From Heart to Paper Writing Workshops? Do you want to register? Please click here.
I picked up Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles because of the intriguing title. The cover shows a photo of a woman on a horse photographed from behind, her long black hair flying. I wondered if this was a Native American story. Perhaps a fantasy adventure? In the first pages I discover these “enemy women” were mainly white and poor, living in the southeastern Ozarks of Missouri during the American Civil War.
I couldn’t put the book down because of Adele Colley, eighteen years old and first person narrator. A Huck Finn type character, Adele speaks her mind, is eager to know her future. She shuns domesticity, knows she’ll likely be imprisoned by marriage, and worried it might be to the wrong man.
Adele’s father gives her a dun horse she names Whiskey, of mixed straw color, grey and gold with black legs, tail and mane. Whiskey is Adele’s beloved familiar, her best friend and true companion. Adele’s mother died of the fever five years before and her brother, with his withered arm, has fled to the hills to avoid being arrested and shot as the Federal Militia arrest Southern men they consider to be “weeds in the garden of humanity” and punish anyone with Southern sympathies.
Even though the Colley’s are officially “non-partisan”, with regard to the North and South, her father, a justice of the peace, is arrested by the Militia as Adele and her two little sisters watch. The Militia then set their house on fire, burning everything, even food and valuables, and beat her father up before taking him off along with Whiskey, who looks back at Adele as he is led away.
It’s hard to read Enemy Women and pass it off as “just a story” because author Paulette Jiles prefaces each chapter with factual, primary source documents from the Civil War era, thus magnifying the power (and horror) of Adele’s story. I experience every woman’s grief during the American Civil War as if it were happening now, in present time, and not a just as a subject of history. Are we all still stereotyped as “enemy women” now?
This book deserves the five stars I gave it on Goodreads.
My latest novel, Pillow Prayers, Love ruined, love reborn after the Summer of Love, is now available as an ebook as well as in paperback.
Buy the eBook of Pillow Prayers!
Read a sample andpurchase the ebook of Pillow Prayers on theSmashwordspage. Pillow Prayers is available in epub, mobi, pdf, lrf, pdb, txt and html formats. Buy the eBook of Pillow Prayers!
You too can be the calm cat writing on a red chair.
Live in the San Francisco Bay Area? Here’s your chance to write your heart out.
From Heart to Paper Writing Workshop Four sessions: Monday evenings: 6:30PM – 8:30PM Dates: 7/8/19 – 7/29/19 Find out more. To Register, click on the Writing is Easy button.
Plus a 5-Day Intensive
From Heart to Paper Intensive Writing Workshop Five sessions: Two Monday & Wednesday evenings: 6:30PM – 8:30PM plus one Saturday morning: 10AM – 12PM Dates: 8/5/19 – 8/17/19
Find out more. To Register, click on the Writing is Easy button.
Click here for recent From Heart to Paper workshoptestimonials.
Expressing yourself in words is a wonder and a joy.
Tony Hillerman, famed mystery writer of the Southwest, wrote the above advice to me the last year before his death in 2008. We had been corresponding since before I published my novel of the ancient Anasazi of the Southwest, Sundagger.net. In a note to him, I had been complaining, whining really, about my writing life.
“A flower is never opened with a hammer.” — motto of From Heart to Paper Writing Workshops
Writing workshops are upcoming in Winter and Spring, 2020.
—Margaret