Newsletter: Wandering Words

Dear AWA Friends,

Summer is a time for daydreaming and letting yourself wander beyond the structure of your busy schedule. Have you given yourself time to restore your daydreaming self? Have you identified a day or a week or more for writing to your heart’s content? One of the words used to identify ‘real writers’ is discipline. But discipline for a writer means allowing the inner life to drift out a window and take what is found. Where is your window of creativity? It doesn’t matter if you spend an hour or a month. The important thing is to know that it’s there and that you can return to it. If you can, give yourself writing time this summer, real writing time. Walk across the dunes, down a path, through a garden. Sit in the shade or collect shells and let your inner voices surface. Open your daydreaming window wide and be astonished, be adrift.

We too are restoring ourselves at AWA. We have been working steadily on a new website, with better search capabilities and internal forums for Affiliates as well as clearer navigation and information about what we do. We are excited!

The Pat Schneider Poetry Contest is still open! Please send your poems to AWA Press. This is an international contest open to everyone, so spread the word to every writer. The details are below. The new issue of Peregrine is available for purchase online as well, with winning poems from the past two years of the Pat Schneider contest included.

The 2016 AWA Training Program Schedule is filling up, but there are still open places in the upcoming September session in Chicago and the November session in Albuquerque. Being trained in the AWA Method gives workshop leaders the necessary tools to establish a strong community of writers. Join us!

On the weekend of October 22 & 23, AWA will host a global fundraiser: Writing Around the World. We already have volunteer workshop leaders from Mexico, across the U.S, to France! We need your voices! Write with us for this first-ever event to support those who would like to be trained in the AWA Method but need financial assistance. More information is below.

With gratitude and respect,
Maureen Buchanan Jones
Executive Director