conrad Storad's non fiction writing workshop

Notes from conrad storads workshop

Writing prompts for kids

build creative writing ideas

Unjournaling

1. About a lass named Dot
she was dot on clock


3. This para has ten words that rhyme with be

Tomorrow May be
she said for the bike ride  by the Yangtze
for the bergamot tea that tastes like fennel
in the fields of her grandfathers village

How to rev your writing?

Let the words find you

Annie Lopez's work was exhibited as part of  Family Matters exhibition at Tempe Center of Arts Gallery. She conducted a writing workshop too.


Art Workshop: What's Your Story?
GalleryNoon-4 p.m., Aug. 25
Exhibiting artist Annie Lopez will lead a workshop about art making and writing. Visitors of all ages can bring their own copies of family photographs or use miscellaneous photocopies provided by the artist. First, participants will write short stories, poems or statements about the images and then color and decorate the work to tell a family story. Free

I was apprehensive about the story part. Still I went. Few years ago I had gone for a painter's workshop where the artist made the portrait of a live model's face. 
When I walked in, a granddaughter - granddaughter pair was working on their story. The artist had a couple of pre-made tiny journals tied with colourful strings. She had some family photographs scanned onto white sheets with sample stories on them. That was on her table.
On the participants table were many paper cuttings of texts and pictures.
I took a couple of family pictures with me. One was with my family marking the time when the whole family started to live under one roof. Another was at my cousin's ceremony similar to Quinceanera. I was set to write about how my cousin's father picked us from the hostel to join the ceremony. From the paper clippings a blue butterfly caught my eye. And there I had the concept of morphing into an adult. I kept turning the tiny pieces of paper to find the text underneath. That aimless text guided my story to what I had not planned to reveal. I see the power of words lying on the table like this for braiding the story. Fixed words of Magnetic poetry might not yield good poetry if you stick to using just those words but with a budding story in mind it can add fuel to the fire.
Keep cutting those words out of the paper into your story.

Extending the metaphor

In Happy family poem, Jane shore writes
Between the sealed lips of each fortune cookie,
a white scrap of tongue poked out


Its through oracles that the future is spoken.

In pg 62 with Jane Kenyon's 'In the Nursing home' Ted Kooser explains extended simile.

What was the first metaphor?


Exercise: Extend each metaphor that you meet.

Writing in the dark

A way to not read what you are writing until you are completely done with it. Things too happen to us like being written in the dark. We arrive somewhere we do not exactly know.
Night at the beach. Night at the office. They are not lifeless. Theres sea life at the former and mosquitoes throbbing at the latter.
The thing about teeth health, it doesnt matter what goes in there, only nothing gets to stay over for the night.
The world's ink is spreading onto the paper,
exceeding the paper,
onto the blanket, carpet,
out the street, into the lake,
into the sea, dark blue ocean.
Even into the Blue Hole. What happens when it mixes the red hydrogen sulphide. Magenta.
Cannot go hungry to bed. All the tubers in the salt lake see the color enveloping them, some fill their beer bottles with it. One student takes it to his lab. He sees the test tubes filled with it and the litmus test he will put the solution through. The perfume tester changes colors. A dab of the liquid starts a tine, a little more bring out a hue, and then some more colors the molecules in a unique way. Two perfumes with their colors next to each other and close is the mixture of their colors.
White flowers with dash of purple here and there like speckles on an egg shell. What is it chemically? What if we changed colors as we ate?
Grow as a flower. Deliver a flower. Float it.The flower takes after the blue of the water, her vine twirls around the perches on the shore. Sometimes the march of people awakens her. She crouches fro the stealth of unwelcome intentions.
A transparent stomach shows a bed of cookie crumbs.