WHEN THE 'TALE' WAGS THE DOG / FROM OLD YELLER TO MOBY DICK: DEVELOPING ANIMALS AS KEY CHARACTERS WHEN: 20 February, 2010 @ 1:00 PM
WHERE: Bel Mar Library at 555 S. Allison Parkway, Lakewood, CO
 Where would Melville be without Moby Dick? Or Jack London without White Fang? Even Hemingway couldn’t have written “The Cat in the Rain” without the cat. And of course, there’s Black Beauty, and Flicka, and Sea Biscuit. The list goes on and on. But it’s not all pretty. What about Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven or Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Daphne du Maurier’s novella The Birds? What is it about animals as characters that both charms us and repels us when they rear their lovely and sometimes frightening heads in the stories we love to read and write? Come to this two-hour workshop with award-winning author Page Lambert and learn how animals can be a storyteller’s best friend.
About Page:
Page Lambert writes from the mountains west of Denver, where she shares the landscape with elk, deer, coyote, fox, and the occasional gnarly mountain lion and scrounging bear. Reader’s Digest was so enthralled with the Black lab Hondo in her bestselling memoir In Search of Kinship, that they paid her $3000 to expand his story. If you’ve read her novel, Shifting Stars (finalist for the Mountains and Plains Book Award), you might notice that Turtle Women’s red roan mare bears a striking resemblance to her half-Arab mare Romie, and to the Denver carriage horse in All the Water Yet to Come. Facilitator of over 150 workshops and retreats, Lambert’s work is featured in dozens of collections, including Chicken Soup for the Dog and Cat Lover’s Soul. A recipient of two Wyoming Arts Council Literary Fellowships, her “River Writing Journeys for Women” were hailed by Oprah's O Magazine in 2006 as “One of six great all-girl getaways of the year.” To learn about her editing, coaching, and consulting work, go to www.pagelambert.com. Read her latest blogs about animals (including vultures) at www.pagelambert.blogspot.com, Connecting People with Nature, and Writer’s with Words.
WORDS, WORDS, WORDS WHEN: 20 March, 2010 @ 2:00 PM
WHERE: Standley Lake Library at 8485 Kipling St., Arvada(map)
 Words are the building blocks of prose. Choosing vivid, precise nouns and verbs can instill energy and originality in your prose, create a believable fictional setting, and bring flat characters to life. But how do you pick the right ones? Join award-winning author Carol Berg and author, expert grammarian and former contest co-chair Susan Smith for the March workshop, Words, Words, Words. Our two speakers will address how to find and select nuanced words, as well as how to avoid those that sap prose of energy and drive readers crazy. They'll address the sensitive topics of adverbs, anachronisms, and weasel words, as well as discuss how to use a thesaurus the right way, ie, not to find elaborate or unusual words, but to find the precise word. And they'll explore the role of word choice in persona voice and fictional world building.
About Carol:
Former software engineer Carol Berg majored in math and computer science so she wouldn’t have to write papers, but since selling her first novel in 1999, she has published eleven epic fantasy novels. Her books have won multiple Colorado Book Award, the Prism Award, the Geffen Award, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. She was voted the 2006 Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Writer of the Year. Her novels have been translated into multiple languages, appeared on bestseller lists, and been read, so readers tell her, on five continents, on a submarine under the Mediterranean, in the war zone of Iraq, and on the slopes of Denali. Carol lives in Colorado and on the internet at http://www.carolberg.com.
About Susan:
Susan Mackay Smith, a.k.a. Mackay Wood, has sold two epic fantasies, Wolf’s Cub and Gryphon King. Susan writes the monthly column Conan the Grammarian for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ newsletter and also co-chaired RMFW’s Colorado Gold Contest for five years; she is currently RMFW’s president.
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