Please note: All Workshops take place at
New Life Presbyterian Church
5540 Eubank NE
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Click Here for Map

Saturday, June 7
1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
$20 for members
$30 for non members
No registration. Pay at the door.

Lisa Lenard-Cook

SWW Workshop
The Mind of Your Story

Learning how to create a fiction with a mind of its own involves a basic rethinking of the writing process. We begin by exploring fictional seeds—those things writers can’t get out of their heads—and how these seeds are translated into fiction through the writers’ experiences and imagination. Next, we explore time, pacing, and tense and tension, moving far beyond the basics into the realm of fiction that makes that mysterious connection with readers. And in the third hour, we’ll discuss the all-important and too often neglected process of revision and rewriting.

Lisa Lenard-Cook’s first novel, Dissonance (UNM Press, 2003), was awarded the Jim Sagel Prize for the Novel, short-listed for the PEN Southwest Book Award, and was a selection of Durango-LaPlata Reads and NPR Performance Today’s Summer Reading Series. Her second novel, Coyote Morning (UNM Press, 2004), was short-listed for the New Mexico Press Women’s Zia Award and was, like Dissonance, a Southwest Book of the Year. Her book about writing fiction, The Mind of Your Story, has just been published by Writer’s Digest Books, and will be their book club’s main selection in June.

Saturday, July 5
1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
$20 for members
$30 for non members
No registration. Pay at the door.

Johnny D. Boggs

SWW Workshop
THE PLOT THICKENS

Plotting can be one of the toughest obstacles in creating a novel. How do you move the story, keep the reader interested (and guessing)? It's like cooking. You have to find the right ingredients. Not too thick. Not too watery. With just enough spice.

Johnny D. Boggs has been praised by Booklist magazine as "among the best western writers at work todayť" and is one of the few authors to have won both the Western Heritage Wrangler Award and Spur Award for his fiction. True West magazine has named him the Best Living Fiction Writer in its 2008 Best of the West Awards.

Boggs has three Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, winning for Best Juvenile Western Novel in 2008 for Doubtful Canon, Best Western Novel in 2006 for Camp Ford and for Best Short Fiction in 2002 for "A Piano at Dead Man's Crossing." He won the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum for Outstanding Western Novel of 2003 for Spark on the Prairie: The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs. His novels Northfield, The Hart Brand and Ten and Me and his short story "The Cody War" were Spur finalists.

The author of more than 30 books and several short stories, Boggs is also a prolific writer of short nonfiction whose works have appeared in 50 magazines and newspapers. He is a frequent contributor to True West, New Mexico Magazine, Persimmon Hill, Wild West and Boys' Life. His website is www.johnnydboggs.com.