Award-winning writer Elayne Clift will present workshop

COURTESY
BELLOWS FALLS, Vt. — All are welcome to take part in Elayne Clift’s free writing workshop, “Making Meaning of Memory –Without Falling Down the Rabbit Hole!” from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 22 at the Rockingham Library.

Memories provide insight into lives and help people understand who they are (and how they got that way). They can offer meaningful triggers for writers in all genre, not just memoirists. Often, however, writing from memory can lead people down a “dark rabbit hole of introspection,” all according to a library press release.

This workshop will focus on life experiences with rigor and honesty, but without falling down the dark hole of humorless self-absorption. workshop participants will emphasize “the funny side of things” as they remember and reflect upon “the loony world in which we live … What could be better in this time of angst?” organizers said.

Come with ideas, memories, laptop or paper/pen, and a sense of the funny and absurd. Be sure to bring favorite writing tools, whether that be paper and a pen, a laptop or anything in between. Feel free to bring a bag lunch and a beverage.

Clift, a Vermont Humanities Council Scholar, is an award-winning writer and journalist whose work appears in numerous publications internationally. A regular columnist for the Keene Sentinel and the Brattleboro Commons, a book reviewer for The New York Journal of Books, and a regular contributor to Vermont Woman and Artscope Magazine, her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. Clift, who formerly worked internationally on public health, communications, and gender issues, published her novel, “Hester’s Daughters,” based on “The Scarlet Letter,” in 2012. Her third book of short stories, “Children of the Chalet,” won First Prize/Fiction 2014 from Greyden Press and was published in 2015. “TAKE CARE: Tales, Tips and Love from Women Caregivers,” her fourth anthology, was published in 2017. Her latest book, “Around the World in Fifty Years: Travel Tales from a Not So Innocent Abroad,” will appear in 2019. For more information about Clift, visit www.elayne-clift.com. This event is free and open to the public.

For more information on this or other library programs, go to rockinghamlibrary.org, call (802) 463-4270, email [email protected] or stop by the library at 65 Westminster St., Bellows Falls.