[stylist] Writers' Division November Telephone Gathering - a special guest

[Robert Leslie Newman]

Hi you all

RE: November's Telephone Gathering is Sunday the 24th

 

This month's guest is, Aileen. She was to be last  month's special guest,
but do to a health issue she was unable to join us. and so now ,
communication is again open. And she would be up for targeting the 24th of
this month to meet with us.

 

Here again is her BIO and comments to us:

 

RE: October's guest is a college writing instructor, setup for us by Chelsea
Cook 

 

First will be the BIO of our guest. Second, will be the times, and numbers
to get on the call.

 

**First:

Aileen Murphy 

Director, Blue Ridge Writing Project 

Senior Instructor, Department of English 

Virginia Tech 

 

Aileen Murphy is the author of a chapbook, There Will Be Cats, a collection
of poetry on the 

subject of raising a child with Asperger's Syndrome.  She is a Senior
Instructor in the 

Department of English at Virginia Tech, and the Director of the Blue Ridge
Writing Project, a 

professional development site for teachers from Kindergarten to college.
She teaches creative 

writing and more recently community writing.  She enjoys writing poetry as
well as nonfiction.

 

After reading her bio, I wrote Aileen and asked for a one-liner of what is
her best advice to a developing writer and here is what she wrote back: 

A one-liner that includes my greatest advice to a developing writer:  Naomi
Shihab Nye says in her poem "Valentine for Earnest Mann" that poems are
everywhere and "what we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them."
With that in mind, I suggest that you have with you at all times a way to
write ideas down that occur to you throughout your day.  If you write
something down when you get a good idea, you can look at it later when you
have more time, when you are better set up to write. But you cannot trust
that you will remember it later, so write it down, type it into a smart
phone, record your voice saying it.  I hand out little journals to my
students at the beginning of a new semester that is just a dozen sheets of
blue or peach colored paper for them to use not only in my class, but also
for them to carry around so they always have a place to record it when an
idea presents itself.

 

Sorry, that is not one line.  In one line, I would say:  

Look for poems out in the world presenting themselves to you, and have a way
to record any potentially good ideas before they are lost.