The Yin and Yang of a Writer's Life

This is an intensive writing workshop that deals with the yin and yang of a writer’s life—the intuitive, interior creative side and the logical, external marketing side. We will cover both the WHY-TO and the HOW-TO of our craft, since it is the fusion
of both that leads to creative combustion and commercial success.

This interactive workshop will teach writers how to:

• Find the inspiration to get those words out of your brain and on to the page.
• Make the proper time and space to support your work
• sharpen your focus, voice, and pitch
• excite others about your creative project
• create a winning book proposal

Jan Phillips made a global peace pilgrimage through 23 countries from 1983-84 which culminated in the book, Making Peace—One Woman’s Journey Around the World. Since then she has written twelve more award-winning books that connect the dots between creativity, social consciousness and spiritual intelligence. She has taught at IWWG since 1990.

Jan is co-founder of Syracuse Cultural Workers which has been publishing and distributing artwork for global justice since 1983. She performed with Pete Seeger to raise $35,000 for Haiti earthquake victims and worked for Mother Teresa in Calcutta and Kathmandu. She leads retreats and workshops throughout the US and Canada.

Got a Movie in You?

NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY! This 90 minute class is not just for screenwriters. It is for novelists, memoirists, personal essayists, short-story writers or ANYONE who wants to learn to get to good story FAST. Linda focuses on the three-act STRUCTURE of a saleable script. As an experienced buyer and seller, she uses award-winning films to teach you sub plots, plot points and act breaks. Dialogue, character, and research are covered in this fun and entertaining class.

Linda wrote twenty-four films and produced five of them. She’s been nominated for an Emmy and the Writer’s Guild Award. Her musical, "Wanna Play?”, was produced on PBS and won her The Alpha Award in Children’s Programming. She’s written two books on screenplay and teaches worldwide for the San Miguel Allende Writer’s workshops in Mexico, for the Colorado Film Commission in Colorado, for the IWWG’s yearly summer retreat (18 years) and also in their Zoom workshops. She teaches memoir, screenplay and fiction weekly at her home in Los Angeles. She’s currently writing her own memoir, Clint Eastwood Swam in My Pool: How an Innocent Survived Hollywood.

Praise Poems: Odes, Elegies and Litanies, a Generative Workshop

We will explore odes, elegies and litanies by other poets and will have time to generate our own poems.

Leslie B. Neustadt is a retired attorney, and a poet and collage artist. She has published two full length poetry collections, Bearing Fruit: A Poetic Journey (2014, Spirit Wind Studios), and The Sustenance of Stars (2024, Kelsay Books). Her poems have been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals. She hosted dozens of online free writing workshops for the Guild during the pandemic, continues to be involved in programing, and has served on the Guild’s Board of Directors.

Writing in a Broken World (Session 1)

**There are 3 sessions in this series and each build upon one another.  Please register for each session separately ($50/ea.) that you would like to attend.**

Our world is broken. We need to reach out to repair the part of the world close to us. The workshop will have three parts:

1. Speak and bear witness (Rainer Maria Rilke, Etty Hillesum, Martin Luther King, Clarissa Pinkola Estes)
2. Journal to uncover our voice (CG Jung, Thomas Merton, Marion Woodman)
3. Write and bear witness (Terry Tempest Williams, Naomi Shihab Nye)

Susan Tiberghien, author of five memoirs and two writing books: One Year to a Writing Life and Writing Toward Wholeness, teaches at CGJung Societies, IWWG, Geneva Writers Group, and at writers’ centers and conferences in America and Europe. Active in International PEN, she lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

Creating Fictional Characters

Who is your protagonist? How did her childhood shape her world view? Learn how early relationships in a character’s life can shape her world view, influence her goals, and make her someone your readers will find complex, compelling, and believable.

Every creative pursuit in Zita Christian’s world can be filed under the umbrella of storyteller. Writer, ritualist, podcaster, and life-cycle celebrant, Zita believes in the power of stories to change the world.

Beyond the Margins: Taking our Personal Poems into the Political World Around Us

Participants will have time to write and share their writing during this workshop. There will be handouts before the workshop.

June Gould’s publications include:, The Writer in All of Us, Beyond the Margins, Outside a Train is Waiting, and numerous poems.She is a Master Writing teacher and has been teaching writing for over 40 years for The International Writers Guild.

Taking Care of Your Writing Self: Creative Self Care, Building Confidence and Setting Intentions for the Coming Year

Taking Care of Your Writing Self: Creative Self Care, Building Confidence and Setting Intentions for the Coming Year - Writing tips, exercises and prompts that promote a more intentional creative process for the new year, encourages creative self-care and helps boost confidence in ones creative abilities.

Terri Bailey is a Gainesville, FL native who holds degrees in Elementary Education, Women's Studies and English & Creative Writing. She is the Founder of the community education and arts nonprofit, Bailey Learning and Arts Collective and the owner of Terri Bailey CHATs a coaching and consultation service provider.

Scene Building Basics

Scenes are the Lego blocks that help you build your book. In this workshop, learn the basic elements of scene building and practice fine-tuning your scene-building so the focus is on what matters to the story you write. Whether fiction or nonfiction (like memoir, biography or other forms of narrative nonfiction) your book is a composition of scenes, and those scenes should move the story forward. Be prepared to write and share. Work with a current project or one of the suggested scenarios that will be given. Scenes must have a purpose, a high point, conflict (inner or outer), texture, sensory
details and a change as a result, whether in the character’s perspective, actions or emotions. Think of each scene as a mini-story within a story. If done well, your scenes will pull the reader forward and keep them wanting to turn the pages of your book. All levels welcome.

Cathleen O’Connor, PhD is an author, developmental editor, writing teacher and coach. She is also an experienced book designer who does layout and cover design for self- published book clients.

Her notable publications include The Collection: Flash Fiction for Flash Memory (Anchala Press, 2018), High Heels on the Hamster Wheel: A Fable for the Modern Woman (Balboa Press, 2013), and The Everything Law of Attraction Dream Dictionary (Adams Media, 2010).

The rights to her 2014 anthology, 365 Days of Angel Prayers,
were sold in 2016. As a book designer, she did the layout and design for IWWG’s 2023 publication Arrows of Light: The Journeys of Afghan Women.

Her first romantic suspense novel is in the query process.

Writing in a Broken World (Session 2)

**There are 3 sessions in this series and each build upon one another.  Please register for each session separately ($50/ea.) that you would like to attend.**

Our world is broken. We need to reach out to repair the part of the world close to us. The workshop will have three parts:

1. Speak and bear witness (Rainer Maria Rilke, Etty Hillesum, Martin Luther King, Clarissa Pinkola Estes)
2. Journal to uncover our voice (CG Jung, Thomas Merton, Marion Woodman)
3. Write and bear witness (Terry Tempest Williams, Naomi Shihab Nye)

Susan Tiberghien, author of five memoirs and two writing books: One Year to a Writing Life and Writing Toward Wholeness, teaches at CGJung Societies, IWWG, Geneva Writers Group, and at writers’ centers and conferences in America and Europe. Active in International PEN, she lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

Mindful Editing for Reluctant Revisers

You will learn how to edit your own writing with greater awareness and focus. You will learn some basic English concepts, guidelines, and skills you can apply for clear, correct, and meaningful writing. By learning to pay attention to the basics, you will be able to get a few more things right before you seek (and pay for!) professional editorial assistance. This class offers an editorial mindset and practical tools to help you see your own writing in a new way.

Andi Penner, an accomplished writer and formerly an English professor and technical editor, is now retired and living the writing life in New Mexico where she is completing a memoir for publication. She has published three books of poetry and writes In Our Own Ink, a Substack newsletter.

Writing Personal Stories that Matter

Annie Dillard once said, “You have to take pains not to hang on the reader’s arms, like a drunk, and say ‘And then I did this and it was so interesting.’ ” What is it, exactly, that makes personal narrative truly engaging? Working together we will be looking at how to find the kernel, the image or concept at the heart of your story. From this kernel, we will explore and apply several techniques useful for writing your openings, middles, and closings. Short submissions of no more than one page are invited but not required. This workshop provides a roadmap for both you and your readers, guideposts to keep them reading and you writing.

Former board chair of the International Women’s Writing Guild, Judith Huge has taught for many Guild summer conferences . For the past ten years, she has conducted writing workshops for the OLLI Program at the University of South Florida. Published internationally in Traveler’s Tales, she is co-author of 101 Ways You Can Help, a guide for providing thoughtful support to those who are grieving.

Writing in a Broken World (Session 3)

**There are 3 sessions in this series and each build upon one another.  Please register for each session separately ($50/ea.) that you would like to attend.**

Our world is broken. We need to reach out to repair the part of the world close to us. The workshop will have three parts:

1. Speak and bear witness (Rainer Maria Rilke, Etty Hillesum, Martin Luther King, Clarissa Pinkola Estes)
2. Journal to uncover our voice (CG Jung, Thomas Merton, Marion Woodman)
3. Write and bear witness (Terry Tempest Williams, Naomi Shihab Nye)

Susan Tiberghien, author of five memoirs and two writing books: One Year to a Writing Life and Writing Toward Wholeness, teaches at CGJung Societies, IWWG, Geneva Writers Group, and at writers’ centers and conferences in America and Europe. Active in International PEN, she lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

Writing Divine Presence

How, in a darkening world, can we locate, recognize, remember, and experience divine presence? Helping us answer that perennial question is one of the ancient powers and functions of writing. Sacred stories, prayers, myths, visions, invocations, prophecies, hymns, epiphanies in poetry and prose, descriptions of moments when life brims with what is beyond us, even complaints about the silence or absence of divinity – all are ways we can write our way, and help others read their ways, toward divine presence. In this class, we will examine a few examples of these kinds of writing, and do exercises to help us practice, build on, and leap beyond them.

Joy Ladin has published eleven books of poetry, including her latest collection, Family; National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna; and Lambda Literary Award finalists Transmigration and Impersonation. She has also published three books of creative non-fiction: Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender; National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life; and Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist, The Soul of the Stranger.

Writing What You've Never Had the Courage to

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” —Muriel Rukeyser
In writing memoir about our lives, women are writing what we know, not what we are allowed to know or expected to know, or, above all, permitted to tell. We will inevitably be criticized.
We often fear being judged if we put our truth on the page. We fear being criticized for being too angry, too vulnerable, too revealing, too sad. We’re told to stay small, not to take up too much space and, above all, to be likable, nice, straight, able-bodied, and mentally sane.
This workshop is an opportunity to reveal your secrets to yourself and others. Write about what you never had the courage to write, what you never have wanted others to know about you. Put your secrets on the page and you can omit and edit later. Allow yourself to reveal your innermost thoughts, secrets, experiences, feelings because we have all had them. Carolyn Heilbrun writes: “Women are telling their stories to publicly tell other women what their lives have been like.” The purpose of art is to change the conversation.
We will look at excerpts from memoirists who have had the courage to put their truth on the page about such topics as sexual abuse, desire, shame, dealing with family secrets: Chanel Miller, Katherine Harrison, Mary Karr, Jeanette Walls, Honor Moore
During the workshop, you will have an opportunity to write your truth and share it in the chat if you wish.

Maureen Murdock, Ph.D. is the author of her new book Mythmaking: Self-Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir and the author of the best-selling book, The Heroine’s Journey translated into 23 languages. Murdock teaches a merry band of memoirists in Santa Barbara and is also author of Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory; Fathers’ Daughters; Spinning Inward: Using Guided Imagery with Children; and The Heroine’s Journey Workbook. www.maureenmurdock.com.