September’s Write On The Cusp Workshop
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:
- an energetic linguistics major who told a story from the point of view of a computer
- an engineer who engineered to support his wanderlust and long term, long distance relationship in East Central Europe
- a mother of two hoping for three who was in the latter stages of a romantic novel
- 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
- 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.