I’ve anticipated each Write on the Cusp more than the last one. It’s not just the opportunity to teach, as big a joy as that is. It’s the opportunity to learn. It amazes me how I’ve been able to evolve my own prose and verse styles using the lessons I’ve learned from some of San Diego’s most exciting writers.

This next workshop coming up on November 15-16 has me giddy already. Saturday we’re doing our very first Rock on the Cusp, a songwriting workshop taught by Bobby Shaddox of the San Diego bands Bobby Fantasy and Billy Midnight.

I saw Bobby Fantasy for the first time a few months back at The Stage downtown. They rock. People show up, they dance, they drink , they shout at the band. It’s like a throw-back to dance hall days, only the sound is modern, and the lyrics are insightful - Let’s change things. Move in a new direction. Question the old ways, because we should, because it’s our duty as thinking people.

The other night I had a chance to spend some time with Bobby for the first time over coffee at Rebecca’s in South Park. He’s a total character. One of those guys you want to follow around, just to see what he’ll do next. He’s also put together a great lesson plan for Rock on the Cusp: A little background and history of rock to start us off, then a flurry of fast-moving exercises that are going to be a blast.

Me, I’ve never written a song before. I’m a total newb. But I’m ready. I want to write a Pulp song, something witty and scathing and romantic as hell, a Pink Glove or an Underwear. I want to write something Frank Black would be proud of, irreverent lines that sum up to something totally apart from their parts. I want to write my own Judy is a Punk. My own Tango Til They’re Sore. My own Stacy’s Mom.

I’m looking forward to Sunday as well. Sunday will be a fiction and poetry oriented Write on the Cusp day. As I’ve written before, I didn’t believe in writing workshops for a long time. But I’ve seen the effect that collaborating with others has on my own words. And I can’t wait for this one.

I hope you’ll be there too. Sign up here. Quick, before we fill up…

Jon Oropeza is a San Diego writer, a co-founder of the Creative Cusp, and man enough to cop to weeping like a wee lad during Barack’s acceptance speech.

Cusp Writers:

Here’s a writing exercise for you. Collaborate with another writer. Write a paragraph about anything and email it to the other person. He/She adds a paragraph and they may edit your work any way they wish as well. Then its your turn again. Go back and forth a minimum of three times. If you don’t have a writer to collaborate with, write to us and we’ll pair you up with someone.

Here’s what happened when Jon and I tried this exercise:

Last night I dreamt about the faceless girl again. The cold bench on the perimeter of the park. I imagined the blue speck in her left brown eye. She was mute but I could hear every word she was trying to tell me. I said her name out loud but it sounded off somehow, so I said it again.

Where you been?

She wanted to know.

She meant it as more of a challenge than a question, but I chose to pretend.

“Everywhere,” I answered. “Everywhere I always told you I was going. Thailand. Paris. San Francisco. That café–”

You and your head again.

She wanted to tell me.

“Alright, little girl,” I said, figuring I’d had this dream enough times, might as well take a new tack tonight. “Why don’t you tell me? Where have you been?”

I knew that she had been absolutely nowhere at all but I had to ask. This was my chance to hear her answer. Ready or not and then the vomiting of a list:

To Singapore. The coffee shop down the street from Mom’s house and that small beat-up car he used to park in the same spot every second Tuesday of the month. Don’t forget the shower. Your shower and the one at the YMCA. I told you already that I went to see where the men sit in the rain where they watch for the birds, the airplanes and for God to suddenly appear. I’ve been there too of course but you knew that. The bus. The train station. The golf course and to the abandoned building on Third.

That was the point at which she paused.

“And?”

No, the building wasn’t abandoned. Not anymore.

This was something new. Novel. She was a liar but she was a consistent one, and she never went back on anything or corrected herself or moved in any direction but forward.

The building on Third Avenue. The one with the interesting facade. Gothic. She knew I knew the one. I nodded. Not abandoned anymore.

“Oh yeah?” I asked. “That dump’s been empty for years. Who would live there? Who could live there?”

She smiled that smile that was a smile only in my mind, because as always she was faceless, but what a smile, shining like a spotlight on our corner of the park.

- Abbie

Abbie Berry writes fiction, as well as teaching and coaching other writers. She currently enjoys broadening her perspective, watching others live and love and writes it all down in Golden Hill.

What an experience!

The September Creative Cusp Workshop was everything we hoped it would be. I was going to type up a recap of the weekend, but Crystal, one of our participating writers, sent me this email that so wonderfully described the weekend, I just had to ask her if we could post it. She said yes, and here it is, in Crystal’s words, last weekend’s workshop:

Before attending Creative Cusp in September, I had never been to a writing workshop or taken a creative writing course. I was late to the first workshop considering the fear had of being asked to read my words in front of others. Relief came when I realized that not only were the Creative Cusp co-founders, Abbie and Jon, working on the exercises with us, they were generous enough to share their writing during each exercise. And while it was evident that they are experienced writers and secure in their respective written voices, they were both very supportive as I and other aspiring writers in my group stumbled through some of the exercises.

It was both a challenge and a pleasant surprise to see how each writer could take the same exercise and give it their own unique twist in such a short amount of time.The background of the Creative Cusp participants were broad and reflective of San Diego proper:

1. an energetic linguistics major who told a story from the point of view of a computer
2. an engineer who engineered to support his wanderlust and long term, long distance relationship in East Central Europe
3. a mother of two hoping for three who was in the latter stages of a romantic novel
4. to a man that shed pounds alongside a twenty year career in the business of food to pursue acting and explore the written word and
5. myself, a former social worker now working on a short film that is essentially a dark love story about clowns.

In Ocean Beach, we sat on the outskirts of a lively soccer game and questionable canine training but one thing was clear by the end of the workshop. There are many angles to code a piece of writing. We explored a number of angles but standout moments were when Abbie lead our tour through voice, the possibilities of writing in first, second and third person and gave us the opportunity to use words and lists to navigate our fears. Jon used introspective and extraspective tactics along with poetic devices to investigate a muse of our choosing. On the last day, I had the chance to weave a piece of flash fiction from guest writer Joe’s prompt: impotent man on 50th wedding anniversary and puppy.

As an aspiring filmmaker, I originally wanted to participate in the Creative Cusp workshop so that I could write stronger storylines for my films. After the workshop, I’ve realized that I want to write stories that also stand alone. The generous support of Abbie and Jon and the other writers at the workshop encouraged me to feel more confident about doing so. I asked Abbie what it was that prompted her and Jon to start Creative Cusp and she said it was her dream. One thing about living your dream is that it inspires others to do the same.

Thank you Crystal for the wonderful words, and thank you to all of the writers who joined us. We hope you’ll join us November 15 & 16 for our next workshop weekend.

Abbie

Abbie Berry is the founder of The Creative Cusp. She writes short fiction as well as teaching and coaching other writers. She lives on, loves on and loves Golden Hill.

That’s what I used to think anyway. Bull-shit. Or, to put it another way, oysters don’t learn to make pearls by attending workshops. I read that somewhere, and it became my off-the-cuff rejection to anyone offering a conference, a workshop, a meetup, a readup, a writeup, or any other event where writers got together to, well, get together.

If you’ve followed our fledgling adventures here, you’ve doubtlessly noticed that there’s two halves to the Creative Cusp: La Chingadera, which is our forthcoming publication featuring literature and art directed to a San Diego audience, and Write on the Cusp, our weekend writing workshops. Abbie and I work together on both halves, but the publication is my baby, and the workshop is hers.

“You’re teaching at our workshops, did I tell you that?” she asked/told me in one of our first meetings.

“Of course…” I said, in my usual cocky way, actually thinking something closer to, “Oh sh!t!”

Teaching! Not that I didn’t have experience teaching - I’ve been mentoring and teaching in the IT industry for close to ten years now. It’s a good part of my day job. But I’d never even been to a writing workshop, and I didn’t even know if I believed in them, and now I was being asked by my new business partner to teach at one.

When our inaugural weekend workshop came in June. I was both excited and nervous. Excited about bringing to other writers some of the hard lessons I’ve learned in 10+ years as a self-taught writer, but nervous too.  Would any of the attendees get anything out of it? Or, would it be one of those things where everyone has fun, but in the end we all shrug our shoulders and go, oh well, whatever?

I can’t speak for the other attendees, but I left that first workshop quite humbled. What I’d thought might be a waste of time turned out to be two of the most valuable days in my writing career. What I’d assumed would be soft, pointless exercises turned out to be loaded with insights and little ah-ha moments. What I’d scoffed at before - being part of a community of writers - suddenly made sense.

Maybe best of all, when I went back to work on Monday editing A Story About San Diego, I found I had new ways of looking at and attacking my prose. Anyone who’s tried to edit a novel knows the value of a new point of view - you get so far into the bush that you start to lose sight of the trees, let alone the forest, right? Suddenly I could see the whole thing again, from a new perspective. Was it one of the lessons I learned? Was it the sum of them? It was hard to say.

But the big lesson was this: Writing workshops, contrary to everything I said about them for years, aren’t bullshit after all, or at least not necessarily. Actually they can be pretty damn useful. I know I’m pimping my own show here, but I believe in it, and I hope you’ll come see for yourself what a writing workshop can do for your work.

Our next Write on the Cusp is September 13-14. Joe Kane is coming back as a guest writer - he’s a local  teacher and fiction writer with a Cleveland attitude. Abbie will be bringing us her insights and I’ll be sharing some more of those hard lessons. You can signup here.

- Jon Oropeza is a local writer, an enthusiast of San Diego fiction and a Co-Founder of The Creative Cusp.

Here’s an idea we want to run by you, our growing community of San Diego writers (thank you for joining us!) -

Have you ever wanted to write a song with an experienced songwriter? This might be your chance.

Rock On The Cusp will be a one day Creative Cusp workshop focused on lyric writing. We’ll have a local songwriter/musician/rock star lead us in song writing exercises. You’ll leave with lyrics and the inspiration to write more.

We’re in the middle of dreaming this one up. Please let us know what you think!

- Abbie & Jon

I love San Diego for the weather.  Don’t you? 

But this city is so much more…

I love San Diego because of the people who live here:  The women who work at La Jolla Dry Cleaners, my favorite English teacher at Mesa College, my mailman, the Firefighters, your mom, the regulars at the restaurant I worked at for too many years, Sarah, Will, Bobby, Stacey, Tony…so many of you. 

I love San Diego for the local artists.  The bands that play any night of the week.  At the Ould Sod, Beauty Bar, Twiggs.  CityFest, Street Scene, Pride, The Little Italy Art Walk.  The Hillcrest Book Fair.  The artists who inspire and are inspired by our city.  Art.  Books.  San Diegans.

I love San Diego for our restaurants and bars:  Turf Club, Mamma Mia, Ono Sushi, The Linkery, Pizza Port, Neighborhood, The Casbah, Belly Up, House of Blues, Canes, Whistlestop, Hamiltons.

I love San Diego for the neighborhoods:

The darkness in Golden Hill in the evening is loud.  Noises talking screaming a car door slams sirens music “frank over here” and occasional helicopters.  The buildings tell stories from the outside in, of families lost and ideas born and ghosts.  Always ghosts.

The toilet runs.  The landlord needs to fix it.  The fan is set on medium as the sounds of the street grumble and spew outside the windows and walls.  In Golden Hill there are no diamonds or Bloomingdales or mansions with loud expensive parties.  Instead, dive bars with eclectic folks who exchange ideas and consume one another for entertainment.  Instead, men pee behind the 7-11 and the firemen close the garage door at night to avoid visitors. 

Women do not walk the street alone at night.  Those El Cajon Boulevard street walkers stick to their part of town.  Mostly. 

In the apartments that were once nice houses now split in threes or fours or seventeens, wood paneling, wood floors, fireplaces that work or don’t, a mess, a love, a desire to build. 

At sunset, the glance towards The Gaslamp, described, as layered in thick buildings, tinker toys, legos built up, smashed and rebuilt again.  Old men and layers.  The needy and abused.  The debt.  The credit.  The park.  Frisbee.  Volleyball.  The lovers of central San Diego.  Art fairs.  Notions of offering what one can give to help.  “Screw yous,”  “Ok thens,”  tourists and you.  In my bed.  Again.  I sleep in.  The darkness of Golden Hill.

Abbie

Abbie Berry is inspired by our city every day.  She wants to know what you think and feel about San Diego.  Email her at creativecusp@gmail.com.

Our next workshop is coming up quick.

http://www.creativecusp.com/august/

We are pleased to have Joe Kane join us again as a Guest Writer. Joe, Jon and I will be focusing on Fiction and all of its pleasures:

• Characterization.
• Voice.
• The experimental.
• The concrete

And anything else in between.

Join us and help grow this community of San Diego writers.

Write on!

- Abbie

And it was a new day.

Our July workshop may be over but it is not forgotten.

Saturday :
1. Jon and I led an experiment in writing perspective, in which we took on the same subjects from two opposing viewpoints - introspective and what Jon calls ‘extraspective’. Some preferred the inward take, some the outward, but everyone had a favorite, and there were plenty of surprises.
2. Deniz Perin ran a section on Characterization, where we let the magic of Ocean Beach’s scene give us characters that we brought to life.
3. Jon tied into Deniz’s exercise with an experiment in audience consideration. He believes in writing for one person, and challenged us to narrow our own focus when writing to appeal strongly to a singular interest, rather than trying to please everyone.
4. Deniz led us on an archaeological expedition into OB where we unearthed modern relics and fictionalized their history. How did it get here, and why, and who brought it?
5. I led the final exercise of the day, in which we faced our worst fears and turned them into fictionalized absurdities.

On Sunday we were joined by guest writer Jenny Minniti-Shippey.

Sunday :
1. “Thieves in the Grass” was Jenny’s first exercise. We took lines from poems that we love and melded them with our own to form new poems.
2. Deniz challenged us to “draw the landscape.” Many of us were inspired by the ocean, the pier or the sand. I personally described the palm tree we were under - “…the bark of the tree does not have the initials of couples in love etched into it. It might, but not today.”
3. Jenny’s second challenge was to create a “how to” list, explaining how to do simple things : eating potato chips, doing a push up, lifeguarding the beach.
4. Jenny showed us how to utilize the strong voice from the Biblical chapter of Genesis to create our own authoritative pieces - And it was good.
5. Jon led an editing exercise that he called “Pass the Rock”, in which we took suggestions made by our fellow writers and dove into the process of editing our favorite piece from the weekend.

Our participating writers had good things to say!

Steve said, “Thank you for a great weekend workshop! Very inspiring!”

Nicole said, “As an inexperienced writer, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from the workshop. I was pleasantly surprised. I found it to be fun, interesting and challenging.”

Amen.

We are currently planning our August weekend which will be held the weekend of August 23rd and 24th. Please, take the next step in your writing career and join us!

The second-ever Creative Cusp workshop is this weekend, July 19th and 20th. There is still time to sign yourself (and your friends) up for two days of free-writing exercises led by experienced writers and publishers :

Abbie Berry

Jon Oropeza

Deniz Perin

Jenny Minniti-Shippey

Ocean Beach is ready for us. The grass, the blankets, chairs and towels, our little selves spewing words and ideas. I’m excited!

Jon and I are looking forward to meeting everyone. Deniz will be back from her time abroad and Jenny has been excited about joining us for quite some time. It’s a win/win.

So bring your journal and be ready to write. We’ll use the heat, the people, the setting and our hearts to come up with new ideas and new characters.

Are you ready?

- Abbie is a co-founder of The Creative Cusp and believes that words are the answer to sanity. So write people! Write!

I get you to lunch and pitch you with my next big idea.

“Dude,” I say, “I’ve got this great idea for a cafe. It’ll be just like a Starbucks. We’ll serve all the same drinks. Lots of milk and sugar bombs, high caff. Skimp a little on the coffee, cause who cares, right? Well-lit. Jazz on in the background. Cute little tables and couches. Modern look. And I’m going to open right next to a Starbucks, too! Only it won’t be Starbucks, it’ll be Jonbucks. I even drew my own green mermaid. Only it looks more like a manatee. What do you think?”

You’re a friend of mine. What are you going to tell me? Good luck? Or are you going to try to talk me out of it? I mean, it sounds pretty preposterous, right? A fake Starbucks, right next to the real thing? Who’s going to go there?

If you were a good friend you’d slap me silly and tell me not to quit my day job.

What I want to know is this : Why aren’t we good friends to our fellow writers?

Why do we encourage our friends to write the next Great American Memoir? Why don’t we tell them to write it to a focused audience? Why do we tell them, hey, finish it, print out a dozen copies and send it to all the big houses? Because you never know! Maybe your Starbucks will be even more Starbucksy than the real Starbucks!

Yeah right.

I’m writing this from Caffe Calabria. There’s a Bucks just down Uni and another just up 30th. And yet Calabria is packed. Could it be because Calabria, instead of trying to be Starbucks, has made a hard choice on who its target audience is? And, having defined who it wants and needs to be, it’s able to focus on being the best possible coffee house for that audience?

It’s an idea…

- Jon O

Jon Oropeza is a local writer, an enthusiast of San Diego fiction and a contributor to the Creative Cusp project.