Tag: WICE

Writing in Paris…….Paris Writers Workshop June 2-7, 2024

If you have ever dreamed of writing a memoir, a short story, a novel, and doing it in the City of Light: Paris, you can do it this summer. My writing story follows.

I discovered reading for fun the summer I turned 14. During summer camp in Vermont, we were bussed down to Tanglewood in Western Massachusetts to picnic and listen to the Boston Symphony who summered there (Back then it was known as the Boston Pops).  Wandering off by myself, I found a gift shop. A plethora of paperback books on three racks greeted me as I walked in the door.  I’d never bought a book on my own.  Going into a shop and browsing, having a title leap out at me and paying for it with my own money, this was new and foreign territory for me. I spun one of the book racks and the title A Separate Peace (John Knowles, 1958) jumped out at me. I bought it.

I devoured A Separate Peace. Every afternoon rest period, I read. At night, in my sleeping bag, flashlight on, I read. The book, about two teenage boys at Exeter Academy, spoke to me.  Before I’d finished, I knew I wanted to write. It wasn’t a crystalized thought. I had so many pent-up teenage emotions with no idea how to express them other than screaming at members of my family. I just knew that getting what was in my head out on paper had to have some kind of transformational impact.

From then on, reading became my way of not feeling so alone. I wasn’t great at talking. I had an A+ in complaining. And, like so many teenagers who feel unfocused creative thoughts, I soon started writing awful poetry.

Over the next 20 or so years, I tried to write stories. I’d start out fine but could never find a way to end them. In my thirties, it dawned on me that I had nothing to say. My life experience was limited, and I had little self-awareness to make sense of the experience I did have. As years passed, I began telling myself that I was Going To Write A Book when I was 55 instead of 30.

Fifty-two years after that Tanglewood experience, I moved to Paris.  I was retired. I had more curiosity than I could contain. Writing courses were plentiful, almost on every street corner! After signing up for the requisite immersion French class, I decided NOW was the time to learn the craft of writing. I joined WICE (Where Internationals Connect in English), an organization that teaches language, creative writing, and photography courses among other offerings. It was mid-October and the only writing course that wasn’t full was a memoir class.

I am eternally grateful that the teacher loved my writing. I signed up for another of her classes in the Spring. I learned that WICE hosts a biannual Paris Writers Workshop (PWW). Unlike many workshops that take place year round in France, this one was reasonably priced. I didn’t hesitate.  Those nasty voices that tell us ‘we’re no good’, ‘Who do you think you are?’, and the zinger, ‘You’re too old to do this’, hadn’t yet taken up residence in my brain. I signed up.  I even met with one of the agents at the conference. She wanted to see more of my writing.

Four years later, I published my first book, Saving Sara: A Memoir of Food Addiction (SheWritesPress, 2020).

I became aware that in my adopted country of France, there are thousands of offerings for the writer and the would-be writer: in-person writing courses, video writing courses, workshops in gorgeous chateaux in the French countryside. But the Paris Writers Workshop stayed my first love. It was the place that had given me the confidence to call myself a writer.

This year, I’m excited to be on the planning committee of the new Paris Writers Workshop, which will be held June 2-7, 2024.

PWW began in 1988. It is the oldest continuous writing workshop in Paris. The 2024 workshop promises to be one of the best so far. The Writing Workshop includes six tracks—Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Memoir/Creative Non-Fiction, Travel Writing, Poetry, and Screenwriting — with an amazing faculty lineup. The wonderful Jennifer Lauck whose Substack Flight School with Jennifer Lauck was one of Sarah Mays top 10 writing Substacks last November will be teaching the Memoir/Creative Non-Fiction track. For the first time, we will be partially sponsored by the Columbia Global Centers and will meet in CGC’s beautiful Reid Hall, in the center of the literary Montparnasse neighborhood. 

Reid Hall at the Columbia Global Center in Paris, 6th arrondissement.

The PWW website goes live January 31, 2024. You can go to the landing page now. Click here to see it. There you will find information on each track and a bio of the teacher.

Registration starts on January 31, 2024. There is an Early Bird registration which gives the writer 100 euros off the 1200 euros price. 

And if the unexpected happens, one can get a full refund. Those dates will be up on the website.

You can also write pww@wice-paris.org for specific information. If you are sure of a track before registration opens, you can claim a spot at pww@wice-paris.org.

A bientôt,

Sara

A different version of this blog appears in the Jan/Feb issue of the AAWE News Paris

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Saving Sara

“Read Saving Sara to see how bad it can get before it gets great–and find out just how she did it, so you can do it too. What a great read.” –Judy Collins, New York Times best-selling author of Cravings and Grammy-nominated singer

Yes, I have written a book. Yes, that Judy Collins, the one who sang Both Sides Now and who we listened to for hours. She read it and told me how much she loved it. I have decided to announce the book on this blog, but Saving Sara and Food Addiction/Compulsive Eating will have it’s own blog starting mid-February.

From the time I was a young teenager, I always wanted to write a book. For all the wrong reasons. My father gave me a diary after we saw The Diary of Anne Frank together, and I was obviously deeply moved by her story. I was ten years old. I even read the book but, though I was inspired to write, I didn’t learn anything about writing and observing and sorting through my thoughts. I used my diary, that had a key and a lock, to complain about my parents and the world in general. Then there were long gaps of three or four months before I took up the cry of the teenage victim once again. It didn’t make for very interesting reading when I found that diary at forty years of age. However, I was impacted by the pain that my young self lived with. Sometimes, I thought I’d made it all up.

I had romantic notions of writing. I thought of starving artists living in garrets in Paris, writing by candlelight and thought how romantic. That would be one way to lose weight. As the years came and went, I set my goal of writing a great novel ten or fifteen years ahead of whatever era I was in. The truth was that I had nothing to say. I was still complaining which no matter how you twist and turn it is boring.

Then I moved to Paris in 2014. I joined a couple of organisations that taught french classes and, it turned out, they also had writing classes. With a push from a friend, I signed up for a writing class in the Fall of 2015. The only class I could find (at the late date I finally made up my mind to do it) was a class on Memoir writing. The teacher thought I was a good writer, that I had a ‘voice’. So I signed up for more writing classes. If you live in Paris and have a creative bone in your body, you take writing or art classes. There is an abundance of them. It is Paris after all. In the summer of 2016, I took a week-long writing workshop given by WICE, the same organization I had taken my first course with. I found I had something to say especially if I was prompted. The thing I had most to say about was my eating disorder that I have lived with all my life. At the workshop, I met an agent who read ten pages of my writing. She asked me if I thought I could write a book. Of course I said Yes! She said, ‘write it and then send it to me.’

It turns out that one needs more than a story-telling voice in order to be a good writer. I had to learn the Craft of Writing. I started this blog in order to practice writing. I hired a coach and learned how to set a scene, how many scenes in a chapter, how to write good dialogue, how long should an average book be. All things I’d never thought about, or was even aware of, although I read voraciously. Almost four years later, I have a finished product. The launch date is May 12, 2020. Amazon put it up on the website for pre-order last August. I have no idea why they do that but they do. Now people are calling me a writer, an author.

I have to say I’m amazed. I actually did it. Not in my forties or fifties but starting in my sixties and the book will be published in my early seventies. It’s possible to find inspiring cliches to give a person confidence and now I’m my own example of why you don’t give up and it’s never too late, you’re never too old. My parents used to say that I never finished anything. If only they could see me now. It was hard work. I almost gave up three times. My editor had great faith in me. She kept telling me I am a good writer and this was a story that needed to be told. Thank goodness for cheerleaders.

I will say more about the book itself in the next blog

For more information on WICE: https://wice-paris.org

I am a champion of independent bookstores. Of course, one can always order off Amazon but go to this website to see where the independent bookstore closest to you is: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781631528460

A bientôt,

Sara