When you carry a dream around as long as I carried the Freshwater dream and it finally comes true, you may suffer with a bout of the big head. The long hours, the sweat and pain of doing the work disappears. You forget what it took to get you there because it’s so sweet when you cross that finish line. I rested on my laurels perhaps a bit too long.
Finally, I settled down and began putting fingers to keys and pens to paper. I decided to set up a writing workshop, to meet at my dining room table every other Saturday. Janet Fitch had been a brilliant teacher/writing coach, drumming the craft of writing into our heads in her workshop. I’d taken notes like crazy. I wanted to spread that knowledge to those who wanted to write or were flirting seriously with that thought. I went about assembling a group of folks including creatives I’d known since my days in the Negro Ensemble Company in NYC and one or two who seemed to be gyrating in the same way I was with the same questions: to write or not to write? To write a script, a novel, a memoir? What will it mean in the whole scheme of things? The questions never stop. The group stayed the course and so here we are, The Longwood Writers Workshop.
The Workshop consists of: myself (of course); Hattie Winston (film, television, and Broadway actress); Denise Billings (author and bookstore owner); Charles Floyd Johnson (television and film producer); Otto E. Stallworth, Jr. (anesthesiologist and author); and GW Williams (author and book club founder).
We went to work on craft – writing the senses, finding verbs that push the action forward, varying sentence lengths, every single sentence, every paragraph, every page has a beginning, middle and ending. We began to practice my favorite Janet note: keep all the balls in the air at the same time! It definitely takes practice.
We gathered at my dining room table on a late Saturday morning in Spring 2018. We made it through the lockdowns via ZOOM then regathered when things opened again. We have carried on and the fruits of the work are here.
