How to Start and Maintain Writers Groups

A successful writers group provides its members with encouragement, support, helpful critiques, marketing suggestions, research tips, networking opportunities, and sometimes a good swift kick. But finding people with whom you can create a functional writers group and establishing criteria and guidelines that will hold your group together can be challenging.

Kathy Hayes and Teresa R. Funke are members of the Slow Sand Writers Society, one of the longest-lasting, most successful writers groups in the region. In this presentation, they will show workshop participants how to start their own writing group. Topics they'll address include deciding which genres to review, meeting schedule and format, effective critique techniques, sharing educational tidbits and news about writing and publishing, and most importantly, keeping members passionate and committed.

Kathy and Teresa will share examples of fiction and nonfiction pieces that were critiqued by their group and demonstrate how those suggestions helped form publishable manuscripts. They will also prepare handouts to guide interested participants in forming their own groups. Their informal lecture format will encourage questions from participants throughout the workshop, and time will be allocated near the end for participants to network with one another.

Email: kathy.hayes@mindspring.com & tfunke1@attbi.com
Enrollment Limit: No Limit

About the Workshop Leaders:

Kathy Hayes has worked as a magazine editor, teacher of public relations and magazine writing, freelance writer, and publications coordinator. Her creative writing-primarily literary nonfiction-has been published in several magazines. With her writers group, she has read at the Loveland Museum and Gallery and will read with them again at Jade Creek Books in April 2002.

Teresa R. Funke is the author of Remember Wake, a novel based on a true story from World War II. She is currently working on a collection titled We Can Do It: American Women's Stories from WWII. Her short stories and personal essays have appeared in numerous literary and commercial magazines. Teresa has conducted or will conduct presentations on writing topics at The Pikes Peak Writers Conference, The Wyoming BookFest, The Writers Summit, and other regional events. She has read with her writers group at the Loveland Museum and Gallery and at Jade Creek Books.