Guest Speakers

Poets and prose writers often find inspiration in other art forms. This is the focus of August’s workshop. We will examine the life and work of visual artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and attendees will create new work with O’Keeffe-inspired exercise.

Georgia O’Keeffe is an American artist who is recognized as the Mother of American Modernism. She is best known for her landscapes and paintings of large flowers.

Writers of poetry, fiction, memoir, and other genres will find this workshop valuable. The workshop will include the writing process, the act and process of seeing, idea-sourcing, and the generative power of juxtapositions.

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Catherine Abbey Hodges is the author of the poetry collections Instead of Sadness, selected by Dan Gerber as winner of the 2015 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize, and Raft of Days (2017). Her poems appear widely in venues including The Southern Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Cider Press Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review. They’ve been anthologized, featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily, and nominated for Pushcarts and Best of the Net. Catherine teaches at Porterville College, co-coordinates California Poets in the Schools for Tulare County, and collaborates with her husband, musician Rob Hodges. Visit www.catherineabbeyhodges.com for more info.

Writer’s block is real. And it prevents many born writers from accepting the call to write. For many more, it adds an unnecessary creative drain to every word.

This mini workshop will neutralize some of the most frequent causes of writer’s block using a 5-step writing process that restores the excitement and curiosity so fundamental to writing success.

Writers already free of the block will experience a fun new writing process proven to unlock the deep creative paths they might otherwise ignore.

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Mandy Wallace shares writing tips, resources, and industry interviews with the 20k monthly readers in her online community, Write or Die, named one of the 100 Best Websites for Writers. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Writer’s Digest, and elsewhere. Her book, Landing Your First Publication: The Writing Prompts + Publication Strategy for Writers Who Refuse to Rely on Luck, is available now.

Intellectual Property Law for Writers

How do writers protect their intellectual property? Join us for our July workshop. Robert Scott Kimsey will be presenting basic intellectual property rights for writers: how they can protect those rights and license them to others. The program will be a general survey of the pertinent Intellectual Property (IP) issues and will include copyrights, trademarks, and licensing of rights.

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Robert Scott Kimsey is a Registered Patent Attorney and a founding member of the firm’s Agriculture and Food Law Practice Group. He has over 19 years of experience counseling large corporations, small companies, individual inventors, authors, artists, and non-profit organizations on intellectual property matters. Over the course of his practice, he has filed and prosecuted numerous patent applications, secured trademark and copyright registrations, negotiated license agreements, drafted employment and termination agreements focused on intellectual property rights, and drafted collaboration agreements between authors and artists.