Earlier this year, the Cape Girardeau Public Library seized the opportunity to join a new initiative to bring fine arts education to adults: Advancing Creative Aging Through State Library Leadership. This initiative aims to improve the health and wellness of adults aged 55 and up by providing them with the opportunity to create original works of art under the tutelage of an experienced teaching artist. Participants engage socially with their peers and celebrate their achievements with a public exhibition of their work.
This three-year initiative is made possible through a partnership between Califa Group, Wyoming State Library, Missouri State Library, and Lifetime Arts. The project is generously supported by a $646,000 Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. We feel privileged to be among the first libraries in Missouri to join the initiative and are excited to make these fine art workshops accessible to our community.
This past summer we had our first workshop series, Adventures in Drawing: Creative Aging Workshop, and our participants were thrilled with the results. All of the participants improved their creative expression, increased their knowledge of drawing, increased their drawing skills, and became more confident in creating art. Most participants formed new friendships and are interested in continuing to learn more about drawing. One participant noted, “Josh is an excellent teacher: patient, clear, and available, but never overshadowing. I loved this class and may consider another either here or at SEMO with him. Thank you for this opportunity!”
This fall, we will host a second workshop series focused on creative writing beginning on October 14th and running through December 2nd. The class will meet weekly from 10:00-11:30 a.m. at the library. Community members interested in participating in this free workshop can register online here. An exhibit of the writings created during the workshop will take place on Saturday, December 7th and is open to the public.
Take a look at the below writing books available now at the library!
Creative Writing Journal: The Art and Heart of Reflection by Stephanie Dowrick
In this exceptionally positive and encouraging book, Stephanie Dowrick frees the journal writer she believes is in virtually everyone, showing through stories and examples that a genuine sense of possibility can be revived on every page.
Creative journal writing goes way beyond just recording events on paper. It can be the companion that supports but doesn't judge, a place of unparalleled discovery, and a creative playground where the everyday rules no longer count. Proven benefits of journal writing include reduced stress and anxiety, increased self-awareness, sharpened mental skills, genuine psychological insight, creative inspiration and motivation, strengthened ability to cope during difficult times, and overall physical and emotional well-being.
Combining a rich choice of ideas with wonderful stories, quotes, and her refreshingly intimate thoughts gained through a lifetime of writing, Dowrick's insights and confidence make journal writing irresistible and your own life more enchanting.
Creative Writing Demystified by Sheila Bender
Whether for high school, college or pleasure creative writing, you need to know the basic elements of the craft. Creative Writing DeMYSTiFieD gives you helpful suggestions for evaluating your work for freshness and originality and offers scores of exercises, techniques, samples and websites to access more. The book introduces you to general creative writing terms and craft as well as genre specific terms and craft elements.
Beyond the Writers' Workshop by Carol Bly
An innovative new approach to teaching and writing creative nonfiction from veteran teacher and critically acclaimed author Carol Bly.
Teachers and writers everywhere are facing the limits imposed by the prevailing models of teaching: community or MFA “workshops” or, at the high-school level, “peer review.” In Beyond the Writers' Workshop Carol Bly presents an alternative. She believes that workshopping’s tendency to engage in wry scorn and pay exaggerated attention to technical details, causes apprentice writers, consciously or unconsciously, to modify their most passionate work.
Inspired by a philosophy of individuality and moral rigor, Bly combines ideas and techniques from social work, psychotherapy, and neuroscience with the traditional teaching of fresh metaphor, salient dialogue, lively pace, and analysis of other literary work in her pioneering new approach. She also includes exercises and examples in an extensive practical appendix.
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee
Draft No. 4 is a master class on the writer's craft. In a series of playful, expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his career and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the most esteemed writers of recent decades. McPhee offers definitive guidance in the decisions regarding arrangement, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces, and he presents extracts from his work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny. In one essay, he considers the delicate art of getting sources to tell you what they might not otherwise reveal. In another, he discusses how to use flashback to place a bear encounter in a travel narrative while observing that "readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone's bones." The result is a vivid depiction of the writing process, from reporting to drafting to revising--and revising, and revising.
Draft No. 4 is enriched by multiple diagrams and by personal anecdotes and charming reflections on the life of a writer. McPhee describes his enduring relationships with The New Yorker and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and recalls his early years at Time magazine. Throughout, Draft No. 4 is enlivened by his keen sense of writing as a way of being in the world.
The Story Cure by Dinty W. Moore
A collection of cures for writer's block, plotting and characterization issues, and other ailments writers face when completing a novel or memoir, prescribed by the director of creative writing at Ohio University.
People want to write the book they know is inside of them, but they run into stumbling blocks that trouble everyone from beginners to seasoned writers. Drawing on his years of teaching at both the university level and at writing workshops across the country, Professor Dinty W. Moore dons his book-doctor hat to present an authoritative guide to curing the issues that truly plague writers at all levels. His hard-hitting handbook provides inspiring solutions for diagnoses such as character anemia, flat plot, and silent voice, and is peppered with flashes of Moore's signature wit and unique take on the writing life.