Creative Nonfiction: Leaping from Form to Form by Jervey Tervalon

According to Jervey Tervalon, every good thing in his life comes from his writing and his habit of reading obsessively. He’s had the good fortune to be paid to write about growing up in Southern California and Louisiana. In total he’s published ten books, novels, story collections and memoir, as well as numerous stories, essays, articles, and poetry.

Tervalon is called a “professional teller and gatherer of stories” and “literary networker” by the LA Times, an “award-winning poet, screenwriter, and dramatist” by Simon and Schuster, and “literary sage, cultural recorder, working class hero, father” by a community blogger.

Recently he said he’s especially fond of food writing, because he gets to eat great food. However love of food has not kept him from more challenging subjects, including murder, drugs and race.  

His dexterity as a writer makes him an apt SBWC workshop leader in the area of creative nonfiction, which blends the skill sets of various forms of writing to create work that reads like great fiction, even if it is not.

His workshop at SBWC in creative nonfiction combines techniques of fiction and nonfiction. The successful creative nonfiction writer strives to incorporate what is important to him or her and then transforms those passions into a compelling narrative. 

Jervey Tervalon was born in New Orleans, but moved to Southern California with his family when he was a young boy. He received his MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine and was a Disney Screenwriting fellow and a Shanghai Writers Association fellow. He is cofounder and literary director of Pasadena LitFest and teaches fiction writing at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His latest novel is Monster’s Chef, published by Amistad/HarperCollins.

Mystery Writing Demystified by Leonard Tourney

Leonard Tourney has been leading a  lively and popular mystery writing workshop at SBWC since 1986. He covers topics important to the mystery genre such as plotting, character development, creating tension and suspense, cluing, and point of view. 

He’s also been teaching writing at the university level for over forty years.

Of his ten published novels, nine have been mysteries.

It could therefore be said that Leonard Tourney knows a lot about teaching writing and a lot about writing mysteries.

What’s not apparent until you spend time in his workshop is that Leonard Tourney is a master of humor. This is not to say he doesn’t take mystery writing very seriously. He does.

Each workshop begins with a focused talk on one area of writing, and questions are welcome. The focus gradually segues into read and critique.  Feedback on the work presented becomes a great opportunity to amplify learning on the writing topic of the day.

Participants in this workshop should come with a willingness to consider new ideas, and actively participate in discussion during the read and critique session. It’s always helpful to practice open-minded listening to the writing of fellow participants and to all the feedback given…especially comments on your own work.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be intimidated by those you think are smarter and more accomplished than you.  It’s not necessarily so.

Leonard offers this tip to writers of all types of fiction: Complete the first draft as quickly as possible to discover the story for yourself. You can tweak and polish at your leisure.

SBWC Changed My Life by Marilee Zdenek

If you think back about your life, is there a specific day or event that changed everything? 

For me it was a week in June in 1977 when I came to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference for the first time.  Four of my nonfiction books had already been published, but I wanted to write fiction, and I heard this was the place to go, for I had a lot to learn. A few conferences later, Barnaby Conrad asked me to lead a workshop, which led me to research ways writers could draw on the wealth of wisdom in the right hemisphere of the brain

I’ve taught at SBWC almost every year since then, and each time I’m grateful for the career that developed as a result.  It wasn’t in fiction, although Ross Macdonald liked the beginning of my novel, and a fine agent, Don Congdon, took me on as a client when Sid Stebel said he should read my novel-in-process.  

SBWC opened doors to an international speaking career and three more books.  This conference was the turning point, and the rewards were literally life changing. The Right-Brain Experience was on the bestseller list of the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Speaking invitations came from Germany and Switzerland, China and India and more.  So this conference changed the direction of my career, and therefore my life.

Every year I look forward to teaching and learning from the creative talent that is drawn here.  I stay in the hotel where the conference is held because I want to be in the midst of the highly charged energy of creative writers and speakers. I don’t want to miss a thing.  

I hope you’ll be there, too.

Marilee Zdenek is the author of 7 books, including Right Brain Experience.

Considered a pioneer in the use of right brain techniques and the constructive use of imagination, Zdenek lectures internationally and has taught her technique to Broadway casts, university students, and for 26 years at SBWC. Zdenek now considers the conference her literary home. Her most recent book is Between Fires, a memoir about recovering from devastating losses and creating a life that is meaningful and deeply satisfying.

Her SBWC workshop: The Right-Brain Experience

This is an experiential workshop to free the powers of your imagination. Each session includes right brain techniques that help you deal with your inner critic, discover ways to make your characters more fascinating, and your story to have greater depth.

A Letter from Monte

To Santa Barbara's community of writers, and all those who travel to this beautiful oceanside city to celebrate the world of letters:

Writing may well be a solitary art, but there is a society of writers whose enthusiastic embrace of each other is irreplaceable. Having been part of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference since 1975, I've come to see that this has been the true reason for our gathering in June all these years.

We read and listen and share our support for that ongoing enterprise. We applaud each other's accomplishments, offer consolation during droughts of rejections, and remind one another that putting words on a page is not supposed to be easy or necessarily rewarding to our bank accounts, so much as it is a gift to our soul. We write because we have to, or because it makes us smile, or brings comfort on gray days, or allows us to communicate with our reader that simplest of ideas that we, too, are alive in the world and this is what we think of being here, and what it feels like to be human. We are the messengers and entertainers, the philosophers and sometimes even the bearers of great notions.

I am welcoming anyone who loves books and writing of any kind, who feels he or she has a novel or a play or a screenplay, a poem, an essay, a memoir locked away inside, who wants to be part of this community of writing to come see us next June 17-22, 2018 and take part in the 46th Santa Barbara Writers Conference.

My name is Monte Schulz, and I am a writer.