Tag: Ames Writers Collective

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In The Media News

2nd Sunday Swift Youth Writers Group & Clair Kruesel

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Hey Youth Writers! Let’s Write at the Ames Public Library.

Join our talented and fun-loving writer and facilitator, Claire Kruesel for our 2nd Sunday Swift Youth Writers Group. Click here to read about Claire and her writing philosophy.

Youth writers meet upstairs in the P.E.O. Room from 2 to 4 PM. Do check the monitors incase of room changes. We supply notebooks and pens, and other supplies to prompt and inspire stories.

2nd Sunday Swift Youth Writers Groups are offered as an Ames Writers Collective FREE community outreach program in partnership with the Ames Public Library.

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In The Media News

Facing Pain With A Pen

Exuberant writers during a recent Writing Circle Wednesday.
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We are thrilled that Writing Circle Wednesday writer, Lori Holliday is featured in Health Connect magazine, a publication of Mary Greeley Medical Center in Ames, Iowa.

For the past year, Lori has been writing with others who have, or are still receiving treatment through the William R. Bliss Cancer Center.

Writing Circle Wednesdays are held on Zoom from 3 to 5 PM, unless otherwise noted. This writing program is held in partnership with the William R. Bliss Cancer Resource Center. For questions and to join a community of writers, email founder, Ana McCracken. Click on the image below to read the article. Hardcopies can be found at Mary Greeley Medical Center.

 

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Author

Pat Underwood

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What’s your genre?
Poetry

Are you published?
Traditional publisher

What inspired you to become a writer?
My cousin, a gifted English teacher and writer, gave me one of his collections of free verse years ago that at first I didn’t understand. After rereading it several times and soaking in the meaning, I learned how stunning poetry can be. He inspired me.

What author do you admire and how have they inspired your writing?
I especially like Galway Kinnell’s excellent work. He had so much to teach us about living life to its fullest.

Name three of your favorite books and their authors
Thirst by Mary Oliver
Everything’s A Verb by Deb Marquart
Dubious Angels by Keith Ratzlaff

What’s one thing readers should know about you?
It’s important to me to share poetry, whether it’s something written by yourself or someone else. Support is important. I look forward to meeting in groups both to critique each other’s work and to educate.

What one piece of advice would you give to a budding writer?
Trust in yourself and the value of what you have to say. Know that you are a beautiful person with words that can reach others in meaningful ways.

Author Bio
Pat Underwood married her high school sweetheart, and they raised two sons on a country hillside north of Colfax, Iowa where the wildlife inspires her writing. She is the author of three poetry collections and received a 2001 Pushcart Prize Nomination. One of Pat’s favorite honors is being a contributor to Voices on the Landscape; Contemporary Iowa Poets edited by Michael Carey.

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In The Media News

Swift Literary Festival | Sunday, Sept 22nd | 10 to 4

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Join the us this Sunday, September 22nd from 10 to 4 at the Octagon Art Festival for our 3rd Annual Swift Literary Festival in Ames, Iowa. Meet our authors, and learn about Ames Writers Collective exciting upcoming news. Look for our tent on the corner of Douglas Avenue and Main Street in front of AVEC Design+Build.
Featured Authors & Poets
10 to 11:30
Marilyn J Baszczynski—Poetry
Paul Brooke—Poetry
Charlie R. North—Poetry
Dawn Terpstra—Poetry
Pat Underwood—Poetry
11:30 to 1
Paul Brooke—Poetry
Charlie R. North—Poetry
Dawn Terpstra—Poetry
Pat Underwood—Poetry
Deb Kline—Memoir
1 to 2:30
Stephen L. Brayton—Mystery & horror
Shannon K. Evans—Spiritual nonfiction
Kim Mosiman—Christian nonfiction
Ice Cube Press
2:30 to 4
William Bortz—Poetry
Charles R. Kniker—Nonfiction
Jennifer L. Knox—Poetry
Eva Newcastle—Magical realism
Ice Cube Press
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Author

Shannon Evans

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What’s your genre?
Spiritual nonfiction

Are you published?
Traditional publisher

What inspire you to become a writer?
I started writing as a little girl and just never stopped!

What author do you admire and how have they inspired your writing?
It’s hard to name just a few, but as a child I was enamored by the work of Lois Lowry, Madeleine L’Engle, and Louisa May Alcott. As a nonfiction writer, Mirabai Starr, Terry Tempest Williams, and Sue Monk Kidd were the ones who gave me permission to trust my intuition and my voice. I love the modern fiction of Jessamyn Ward and Celeste Ng.

Name three of your favorite books and their authors
When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd
11.22.63 by Stephen King

What’s one thing readers should know about you?
I’m a liberal Catholic feminist who predominately writes for women but welcomes male readers too.

What one piece of advice would you give to a budding writer?
Sit under as many editors as you can!

Author Bio
Shannon K. Evans is the author of The Mystics Would Like a Word, Feminist Prayers for My Daughter, and Rewilding Motherhood. By day, she serves as the spirituality and culture editor at the National Catholic Reporter. She and her family make their home in Ames, Iowa. Click here to visit Shannon.

A Generative Writing Workshop for Adults

Do you dream of writing “someday,” but don’t know where to start? Perhaps you already write, but you’re stuck.

Join this FREE monthly writing workshop for adults, which provides a safe space for writers of all stages and genres to generate stories inspired by prompts running the gamut from phrases, poems, photography, guest authors and their prompts, or a piece of artwork. We will read our stories to one another and share only positive feedback.

These workshops are inspired by the Amherst Writers & Artists Method, which believes that everyone is a writer.

This workshop is held at the Ames Public Library from 10 to 12 PM upstairs in the PEO Room.

Presented by the Iowa Center for the Book and Ames Public Library in partnership with the Ames Writers Collective.

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Author

Dawn Terpstra

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What’s your genre?
Poetry

Are you published?
Traditional publisher

What inspired you to become a writer?
As a family growing up on a teacher’s salary, entertainment for the week was found at the public library on Saturday mornings. I would stock up, checking out as many books as I was allowed, and then spend hours lost in the lush imaginations and language of storytellers. I knew from the time I was a second grader, when I wrote a twenty-page story, “Hanky and the Giant,” that writing was my true calling. Thankfully, I have built a career writing radio commercials, political ads, corporate marketing and communications and teaching high school English. Writing poetry has always been a therapeutic guilty pleasure.

What author do you admire and how have the inspired your writing?
My answer to the question about an influential author is often “the one I’m reading now.” There are too many choices! In poetry, early influences were the Romantic poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats. I loved the landscapes and characters in novels by John Steinbeck and William Faulkner. In college, the quirky ingenuity of e.e. cummings was an obsession. In graduate school, I find myself returning to an interest in form and meter influenced by the work of A.E. Stallings, Marilyn Hacker, and Annie Finch. Combining form with poetry of place and the environment is currently where my interest and work resides.

Name three of your favorite books and their authors
Modern Poetry and frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss
Swift: New and Selected Poems by David Baker
Shirt in Heaven by Jean Valentine

What’s one thing readers should know about you?
My husband and I live on 15 acres in rural Jasper county, where our hives of bees and two corgis are usually happy. I am an avid birder. I have no fingerprints. I defer to our granddaughters to touch everything and leave a mark.

What one piece of advice would you give to a budding writer?
One is never too old (or too anything) to set and realize one’s truest, wildest writing goals. Ignore the naysayers. Believe in the (im)possibilities of your writing. You can always learn process. You can’t learn the desire and passion for your art. Own it.

Author Bio
Dawn Terpstra is a poet, writer and beekeeper living in rural Iowa. Her poetry appears in publications and anthologies including Verse Daily, Midwest Quarterly, Quartet, The Grist, Cities of the Plains, and others. She is the author of a chapbook, Songs from the Summer Kitchen. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is currently the Poetry Editor for River Heron Review. She is a graduate of Iowa State University with an undergraduate degree and two masters degrees. She is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University.

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Author

Marilyn Baszczynski

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What’s your genre?
Poetry

Are you published?
Traditional publisher

What inspired you to become a writer?
I think my love of stories brought me to writing. Then, as I began writing my own stories, I felt myself connecting to poetry, exploring that condensed and intense form as a good vehicle for what I wanted to share.

What author do you admire and how have they inspired your writing?
Margaret Atwood and her relationships with nature and people would be first. But when we moved to Iowa, Ted Kooser and his work resonated very deeply. I love how his poems draw the reader down into the specific details of the experience without the poem drawing attention to itself.

Name three of your favorite books and their authors
I have far too many favorites to list, the three recent ones are: The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl
Gratitude with Dogs under Stars by Deb Marquart
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay

What’s one thing readers should know about you?
Living in a rural space informs much of what I write about. It feels like a liminal space. This contributes to my belief that we are all connected to each other in our emotional landscapes, as well as to everything in the physical and spiritual world around us. I find myself writing in this space at the present time.

What one piece of advice would you give to a budding writer?
I always recommend that writers read extensively, and outside of the genre that they intend to focus on. There is an abundance of literature, and life, to inspire us. I think we just need to keep still to listen and receive it.

Author Bio
Marilyn J Baszczynski is a retired French teacher, originally from Ontario, Canada, who lives and writes in rural Iowa. She has two chapbooks: Gyuri. A poem of wartime Hungary, and daughter, while i’m still here. Her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies including Abaton, Aurorean, Backchannels, Conestoga Zen, Gyroscope, Half-Way Down the Stairs, Healing Muse, Last Stanza, Midwest Poetry, Scapegoat, Shot Glass Journal, Star82 Review, Slippery Elm, and others. Marilyn is past-president of Iowa Poetry Association and editor-in-chief of their annual anthology, Lyrical Iowa, since 2017. Click here to visit Marilyn.

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Author

Charlie R. North

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What’s your genre?
Poetry

Are you published?
Traditional publisher

What inspired you to become a writer?
During my first year of high school, I found the magic of poetry. It works as the thread that stitches together emotion, experience, time, and place, connecting the writer with the reader. Who wouldn’t want to share a magic like that?

What author do you admire and how have they inspired your writing?
Naming a favorite author feels impossible, as l appreciate so many of them. However, when I first read Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, I was captivated. How Plath used imagery, metaphor, and symbolism in her poems mesmerized me. She was mysterious and yet transparent, complex, and yet she confessed everything. Her work required abstract thinking and pushed me as both reader and writer. Because of her work, I now research words, places, anatomy, nature, and everything in between until I find the best artifacts for my writing. My curiosity about the world grew, and with it, so did my poems.

Name three of your favorite books and their authors
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Wintering by Katherine May

What’s one thing readers should know about you?
I hope I never stop wanting to learn or that I lose the desire to submerge myself in experience.

What one piece of advice would you give to a budding writer?
Everything I would tell a budding writer is cliché and would make every word-nerd reading this cringe (me included). I can’t give anyone advice, but what I can share is a sliver of my experience: always have something to write with.

Author Bio
Charlie R. North grew up in a small Montana town, discovering her love for poetry early on. Now living in Iowa, she and her husband have raised their family there. A graduate student at Iowa State University, Charlie is working toward a degree in English literature. Her poem “Battered Secrets” was a top finalist in Wingless Dreamer’s Calling the Beginning anthology. She has been published in Poet’s Choice, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, and won Lyrical Iowa’s 2022 First Time Entrant Award. Her work was also recently featured in The Cities of the Plains An Anthology of Iowa Artists and Poets, published by Grand View University.

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Author

Steve Semken | Ice Cube Press

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What’s your genre?
Publisher

Are you published?
Traditional publisher

What inspired you to become a publisher?
I founded Ice Cube Press in 1991 to use the literary arts to better understand how to live in the Midwest.

What author do you admire and how have the inspired your writing?
Jim Harrison, Terry Tempest Williams, Gary Snyder and so many authors over the years.

Name three of your favorite books and their authors
In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Any poetry with Mary Oliver

What one piece of advice would you give to a budding writer?
It’s hard to even be a bad writer once you decide you want to be writer. Write and read. And, treat other authors as you would like to be treated.

Author bio
Book Publisher since 1991, Writer since first grade. I’ve earned my 10,000 hours the old-fashioned way by fixing my mistakes. Where Smart Thinking and Creative Minds Commemorate Being Bold, Ferocious, and Brave. Check out my Substack. I’ve written a few books, but mainly I publish others. Click here to visit Ice Cube Press.