In 1999, faculty member Meg Files asked Sheila Bender and Jack Heffron to join her in reviving a conference she had directed in Colorado for many summers. For two years, the three of us met in Glenwood Springs, CO with attendees from around the continental US. We enjoyed the June Rocky Mountain air and the hot springs and vapor caves Glenwood is home to. In our third year, we moved the conference to Steamboat Springs and continued to enroll people from all over, including Hawaii and Australia.
In 2004, Meg suggested Sheila bring the conference to Port Townsend, WA. The timing near the summer solstice and the latitudes of the gorgeous Northwest made for lovely long days amidst Port Townsend’s charming Victorian seaport ambiance and arts culture.
In 2009, Meg, Jack and Sheila were excited to announce a special conference time and place prompted by the six-week closure of the Hood Canal Bridge, which links the Olympic Peninsula to the Seattle area mainland. While the bridge was being repaired, Writing It Real’s annual conference took place on board the Rhapsody of the Seas, leaving Vancouver, BC and cruising Alaska’s Inside Passage. We offered our lectures, small group in-class writing instruction, small group manuscript workshops, and writing and publishing consultations aboard Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas.
We have now offered this conference in Madison, WI at a gracious Benedictine retreat center in addition to our Port Townsend location and are excited about our ranch experience at the historic COD Ranch in Oracle, AZ. Wherever and whenever we come together, the writing continues and deepens, connecting us to one another and to our own dreams and experiences. Join us!
Sheila Bender has begun teaming up with Ruth Folit, Lifejournal.com‘s creator and founder of the International Association for Journal Writing (IAJW.org), to offer journaling intensives. Whether you want to keep a personal journal or use a journal for creating writing you’ll one day publish, this weekend workshop will help you overcome writing procrastination and inertia. You’ll learn craft tricks to keep you going and ways to enrich your writing so you feel interested as you make journal entries. You”ll make friends with others interested in regularly putting words on a page. Join us!
May 11, 2012, Sheila Bender joins Susan Bon of Tiny Lights magazine and Yesim Cimcoz of the Writing Istanbul Project to bring US writers to Istanbul. Four days in Istanbul and an optional three-day add on trip to explore the Izmir area including Ephesus. Join us!
Writing Memoir
Sheila joins agent Jill Marr and award-winning author Susan Wingate several times year for weekend intensives on writing book-length memoir and finding stand-alone essays to publish as you go. Our upcoming weekend workshop is April 4/21-22. 2012. Check this out.
Sheila joins Meg Files for a weekend of teaching in Port Townsend at the Centrum Writer’s Workshop June, 14-17, 2012 workshop.
