Helen Hemphill's Blog

December 21 is almost here! That's the deadline for the March 11-17, 2012 Whole Novel Workshop featuring faculty Kathi Appelt, Jeanette Ingold, Alan Gratz, and Martha Mahalik.  Maybe it's time you asked Santa to help make 2012 your year to publish.  Besides getting an amazing manuscript critique from one of the award winning faculty, you [...]

I got home from Chautauqua on Saturday and then, on the following Friday, headed back north for a family vacation. We stopped in at Chautauqua for a day, and it was a wonderful experience to just be a visitor.  We took in a lecture, had a great meal, sat on the porch at the Athenaeum, [...]

Sharon Creech joined conferees at the Highlights Foundation Chautauqua Writers Workshop on Thursday morning. Her message? Always ask your readers to come along with you in your stories. How to do that? With words. She asked writers to write in an auditory manner, letting the reader know what's in the writer's head, letting images and [...]

Here's my disclaimer: Kathi Appelt was one of my workshop leaders when I studied at Vermont College. I've heard her speak many times–lectures at Vermont, keynote speeches at conferences, and as a workshop leader. Kathi's words are always good, but her remarks on Wednesday morning at the Chautauqua Writers Workshop were stunning! Her advice to [...]

Editor Patricia Lee Gauch told Writers Workshop conferees to go to the well of their own imaginations in her keynote address this morning at Chautauqua. Imagination is the raw material of all writers, she noted, and through it, we must mine our story ideas, looking for the emotional connections that reside in our particular human [...]

What does award-winning author Mitali Perkins do for a living?  She's "widening the hearts and minds of children, and thereby changing the world." That was the power of Mitali's Writers Workshop keynote tonight on the clout of storytellers. Stories are both mirrors and windows into the lives of children, and Mitali focused on the shared [...]

After giving an inspiring keynote address this morning on how to be the Wizard of Oz to your own writing, Peter Jacobi suggested Writers Workshop conferees pick up a handout as they left the Hall of Christ. The handout was a list of questions writers should ask themselves as they write, and it was a [...]

While I am a first-time attendee at the Highlights Foundation Writers Workshop at Chautauqua, I am not the one to whom Helen will introduce you later today! I am here, not as a conference participant, but as a guest with only the responsibilities of sharing with you what is going on during this week. While [...]

Tonight was the opening session at the Highlights Foundation Writers Workshop at Chautauqua. National Award winning author Kathryn Erskine gave tonight's keynote address. Her advice?  Be selfish for a week and really focus on your writing. Sometimes that's hard to do because we don't give ourselves permission to be creative, to be writers, to be [...]

Writers workshop. Six traits. Technology and social media. The current trends in teaching writing can be almost overwhelming.  Most teachers just want something that works! Award winning YA author Carolyn Coman has a new book on writing craft that helps teachers maneuver between teaching practice and techniques that professional writers use in developing stories. The [...]