10/22/2011 05:37 PM Come Write the Story of Your Life Please join me and other instructors on November 11-13 in Ojai, California for the Ojai Writers' Conference, where I'll be speaking at the Saturday luncheon and leading a one-day workshop on Sunday for memoir writers of all levels. My Sunday workshop, “Transforming Real-Life Events into Story,” will help guide your anecdotes from entertaining dinner-party stories to actual, publishable products. You'll receive information about the four basic elements of successful memoirs, including structure, detail and description, characterization, and scene versus summary. Short writing exercises will be incorporated into the day to help you flex your memoir muscles, and brief excerpts of published works will be handed out as examples. By the end of this workshop you’ll have tools to start a 750- to 1500-word short memoir, and maybe even a few first-draft pages. Cost is $149 Times: 9am-Noon (break for lunch) and 1:30-4:30pm. Mention "Hope sent me" when you register and receive a free, signed copy of The Possibility of Everything! For more info and registration details, go to the Ojai Writers' Conference web site. And check back for information about memoir workshops next July at the Iowa Summer Writers Festival in Iowa City, and October in Paris!! Posted by Hope Edelman 05/27/2011 04:16 PM Ojai Writers Conference Next Weekend--June 3-5, 2011 For all aspiring and practicing writers out there: next weekend (June 3-5) is the first Ojai Writers Conference in beautiful Ojai, CA. It features Friday pre-conference workshops in memoir, screenwriting, essay writing, and myth, a Saturday VIP luncheon, and workshops and talks all day Saturday and Sunday morning as well. It's limited to only 100 participants but as of today there are still spaces left. Come for one day or all three! I'll be teaching a personal essay workshop on Friday from 1-4, speaking at the luncheon on Saturday, and talking about the distinction between memoir and personal essay--and which one is best for your unique story--on Saturday late afternoon. Click here for more info. Hope to see some of you there!! Posted by Hope Edelman 05/08/2011 12:01 PM On the Occasion of Mother's Day Wishing you all a most beautiful and peaceful Mother's Day, in recognition of those of you whose continuous and loving efforts will create our next citizens of the world. And with thanks to you for sharing the steps of your journey with the rest of us who so benefit from your experiences and stories. I know this is a solemn day for those of us who've lost mothers, and I'd like to recognize those who have passed as well. This July will mark the 30th anniversary of my mother's death, and there hasn't been a Mother's Day since then when I haven't thought of her, missed her, and been grateful for what she did give me in our short time together. So on this day I'd also like to honor the mothers who are no longer with us, and acknowledging that we are all part of the strong and varied chain of female experience. With gratitude and admiration for us who are doing the work, and all who have done it in the past, Hope Posted by Hope Edelman 04/26/2011 08:49 AM New Writing Workshop, May 13-15 Only two seats are left in the Intro to Creative Nonfiction writing workshop in Santa Monica. Please contact me soon if you'd like one of them! The workshop will run from 3 p.m. Friday afternoon, May 13, through dinner on Sunday, May 15, and will be held at the historic Georgian Hotel--just steps from the Santa Monica Pier and beach. Our guest speaker on Sunday will be Mim Eichler Rivas, author of more than a dozen nonfiction books, including Beautiful Jim Key and The Pursuit of Happyness. Cost is $450 and writers of all levels are welcome. More detailed information can be found here. If you're interested, please email me at hopeedelman@gmail.com for registration forms. Hope to see you in May-- Hope Posted by Hope Edelman 03/17/2011 09:43 AM Motherless Daughters' Guides: Please Share Your Ideas In the 17 years since Motherless Daughters was first published I've heard from thousands of readers who've written in to share their individual stories. Among the many common experiences we share, one tends to surface frequently: without a mother, many of us feel we lack much of the basic information women need and that women with mothers naturally possess and we don't know who or how to ask. I think of a woman I met back in the early 1990s, whose story appears in the first edition of Motherless Daughters, who told me about stealing an etiquette book from her local library when she was about eleven and reading it cover-to-cover when she got home because she was so hungry for information about how to be a woman, and so afraid of doing the wrong things, after her mother died when she was nine. All these years that story has stuck with me and it's no less poignant or heartbreaking now than it was eighteen years ago. I thought of it again the other night as I was explaining the elusive rules about thank-you notes to my thirteen-year-old daughter. If I weren't here to tell her, how would she know when to send them or what to write? Would she even know she was supposed to send thank-you notes at all? Motherless Daughters was meant to be an overview book that identified and explained a phenomenon rather than a self-help book or how-to manual. But lately I've been wondering if, in addition, motherless girls and women would also benefit from short, very practical guidebooks to navigating some of the situations and life events that mothers typically teach daughters how to manage or actually steer them through. And of course, plenty of women with mothers don't get what they feel they need from them, so these guides might be helpful for them, too. At the very bottom of this page I've made a list of the subjects that come up most in reader mail, and for which motherless women often feel in need of guidance or advice. Would you be willing to take a look and let me know which would be or would have been most useful for you? Please scroll all the way down to find the poll and to vote. This will give me an idea of which one(s) to start with or if this is even a good idea. (The titles listed in the polls are only placeholders at the moment to convey the main ideas; hopefully I'll come up with better ones later, or please suggest one or more that you like.) And please feel free to suggest guides that aren't on the list, or comments about the idea in general in the comments section below. Would you buy any of these guides for yourself? For someone you know? Would you like to see several bundled together in a set? How would you like the information to be presented? Or do you feel that Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers have already covered this material sufficiently for you? Very much looking forward to your thoughts, Hope Posted by Hope Edelman