Writing Together: Get Out of Your Own Way and Create with Lynn Schmeidler (in person at HVWC)

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”  -Mary Oliver

Writing can and should be a means to connecting to our most humanly unique selves, and this workshop will be all about doing so by playing on the page. Through a series of open-ended writing prompts, participants will be given the opportunity to explore their own voices and experiment with various techniques to quiet the internal critic and welcome the internal creative. Our time together will include opportunities to share what we have written for the delight of one another. By the end of the four hours, participants will have the beginning of a number of different pieces or a first draft of something new and exciting. Appropriate for all levels and all genres.

Lynn Schmeidler is the author of Half-Lives (March 2024) which was selected by Matt Bell as the winner of the 2023 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Fiction. Her story, “InventEd” was chosen by Jonathan Lethem as the winner of BOMB’s 2023 Fiction Contest. Her stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Georgia Review, KROnline, The Southern Review and other venues. She is also the author of three poetry books: History of Gone (Veliz Books), Wrack Lines(Grayson Books) and the award-winning Curiouser & Curiouser (Grayson Books). Schmeidler’s writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has been listed under Other Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a Sewanee Writers Conference Tennessee Williams scholarship in fiction and has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She and her husband live in the Hudson Valley.