Word Pirates dress up for Halloween: Laura the devil, Lindsay the adorable construction worker and Noelani the tiger salamander.

We will have our reading event at the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma on Feb. 8, 2007. Hurray! We will be able to feature a ton of visual artists, in addition to the reading stylings of the fabulous Word Pirates. Any artists interested should e-mail us.

We will have another critique sesssion for everyone in December. For Word Pirates who want to read at the event, the December critique is the chance to workshop the piece that will be performed. Then after that, we will have occassions to practice reading so that once the content is all sewed up, you can practice your delivery in front of some friendly faces.

Our very own Noelani is fiction editor of en fuego, a new lit journal. She is looking for stories, so send them to her already!

And now on to the prompt …

We wanted to tie our personal experience with those of others, to connect to our readers. Prompt: Tell a true story about yourself that ties you to a historic event or person. Since this involves some research, we had a brain storming session rather than writing in group. Some good examples of this include a piece in which David Sedaris visits the Anne Frank house during the height of house hunting and decides it’s the perfect house and a piece by Sarah Vowell in which she and her sister, both of Cherokee heritage, visit the Trail of Tears.

Founded in 1993, Creative Nonfiction was the first and largest literary journal to focus on nonfiction prose exclusively. They publish “simply great essays by talented writers,” according to the Library Journal, including work by Annie Dillard, Diane Ackerman, Andre Codrescu, Terry Tempest Williams, and Floyd Skloot, among others.

The creative nonfiction genre was the center of attention earlier this year when James Frey revealed that parts of his memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” were fabricated. As the public appetite for true stories grows, so does the writer’s temptation to embellish. But even when the veracity of a writer’s work is not in question, the relevance of it often is. In her interview with us, managing editor Hattie Fletcher emphasized the importance of writers moving beyond their own personal memories into a broader realm. Good essays have an eye to the wider issues and are backed up by research. As its website says:

Writers should employ the diligence of a reporter, the shifting voices and viewpoints of a novelist, the refined wordplay of a poet and the analytical modes of the essayist.

Yesterday’s Word Pirates meeting was one of the good ones. As usual, the first thing we did was to read our work aloud to each other. (BTW, I was very happy to see that even when some of you don’t make it to the meeting, you still do the prompts.)

After that, we discussed what makes a story a story. Though we didn’t come up with a solid answer to that question, we did agree that the point of a story is to connect with an audience. So how do we take a memory or story idea and turn it into something that people connect with? We discussed different ways to do that, from breaking the idea down to its emotional /social elements, to just writing it and seeing what happens, to making sure there is good imagery and emotional honesty in the piece. We also agreed that a character should shift within a story, even if that shift is small.

Which brings us to this week’s prompt: Write a short-short where a character changes in some way. For example, something could happen so that a wife suddenly falls out of love with her husband, or a vegan could smell some bacon cooking and suddenly decide to be a meat eater … etc.

Our next meeting is October 19th. Since I will be out of town, the meeting will be held at Steve’s house in East Petaluma. In honor of Part 3 of the Interview Series, which will be with an editor from Creative Nonfiction, we will be focusing on the essay. See you then.