International Women's Writing Guild (IWWG) Conference 2024

 

Roger Williams University

 IWWG put on another wonderful conference this year.  Held on the picturesque shores of Narragansett Bay in Bristol Rhode Island at the RWU campus on August 1-5, 2024, the IWWG's Writing Together: Community, Connection, Creation conference was a fabulous event full of inspiration, information and comradery.  It was a time to focus on our individual writing agenda and enjoy the luxury of being in the company of our writer friends once again. The workshops ran daily Friday through Sunday and covered all the genres. I have two projects in progress that I vacillate between: In the Kitchen, Hardware is Jewely(fiction) and Between Hunger and Heartache (memoir), and there were plenty of excellent workshops being offered that would inspire both those genres moving forward.

On Friday morning I saw a dozen or so women in the yard by the gazebo indulging in the morning meditation hour, but my brain only wanted to indulge in coffee. I had to be awake for my first session at 8:30:  Secrets & Lies. Writing Mystery and Suspense by Lynne Barrett. It was three days of understanding the buildup of mystery and suspense with each day having a different focus: character, plot and structure. I've been contemplating returning to a piece of fiction I started last year and since I've taken workshops with Lynne before, I knew it would be helpful and inspiring. There were several points she made that stuck in my mind: tension builds on physical space and increases as you get loser, distrust makes you observe, fear makes you panic. 

My next workshop was in the Memoir genre. Last year I completed a personal memoir that I gave as a Christmas present to the family. It is more biographical than I would have for a published memoir, so I am revising it to be more thematic.  At a previous IWWG conference, I took an intensive with Judith Huge which helped me with the voice and the agency built into in that memoir.  At this conference I chose Myth Making & the Art of Memoir by Maureen Murdock.  We talked about the various types of memoirs and read from a variety of structures. There are so many ways a memoir can be written. The coming-of-age memoir is often a younger age like 3-18, a braided memoir weaves the past and present sometimes every other chapter and circular which is when you keep coming back to a particular meaningful point in the story like Mary Karr's Liar Club. A framed memoir like Cheryl Strayed's Wild will focus on a period of your life and the Associative type is highly thematic such as Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story.  This workshop helped me to understand what type of structure my next memoir will embrace.

Another phenomenal workshop was The Lioness In Winter by Heather Cariou.   This workshop was based on the book by the same name and authored by Ann Burack-Weiss. The focus of our time was understanding this statement: Aging is loss, but it does not mean all is lost.  We did allot of prompt writing and sharing under the guidelines of What do I know now, that, I didn't know before, and How do I feel?

There was a choice of so many workshops that I was often torn between which one to take.  There were some offered on Zoom also.  The 4:30 timeslot was reserved for those wanting a critique of their work whether it be fiction, non-fiction or poetry.  

After dinner turned into a more casual party atmosphere with writers signed up to read during Open Mic followed by networking receptions.  Saturday night ended with the "Women With Wings Writing Award" presented to Tracy K Smith from Heather and Len Cariou in celebration of the poet's writing on behalf of social justice.  For anyone wishing to join the International Womens Writing Guild you can learn more on their website: www.iwwg.org.