The 25th Write on the Sound Writers Conference was held in Edmonds, Washington on Oct. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, 2010. Having recently relocated to Corvallis, Oregon and thus living much closer to the state of Washington than I had been before, I decided to make a road trip to Edmonds to attend the conference and see my long-distance boyfriend who lives not far away from Edmonds.
This was the first time I had attended any writers conference other than the South Coast Writers Conference, which I have attended for the past four years. WOTS is a much larger conference, with double the attendance as the SCWC. It has a maximum limit of 200 attendees and always sells out. This year since it was the 25th anniversary, attendees were given a free pen and tote bag with a 25th anniversary logo. Very nice!
WOTS also runs for three days rather than the two I was used to. I enjoyed the extra day, as it meant that many more workshops to attend! While there is no Author’s Night as at the SCWC, there is a Keynote Speaker Saturday afternoon, and there was an author’s book signing and reception on Saturday night, complete with refreshments and music, where you could meet many of the authors who were presenting workshops over the weekend. There was also a temporary bookstore open during the day for attendees to purchase books and other items.
Having enjoyed my first all-day intensive workshop at SCWC earlier that year, I decided to take a five-hour workshop on Friday on poetry with instructor Holly Hughes. Class size was limited to ten, and all of us were women. Hughes is a very good instructor as well as poet. In the weeks before the conference, she asked us all to e-mail some of our poetry to be critiqued during the workshop. Thus, we had had a chance to read and make notes on what we thought of the other attendees’ poetry in advance. During the workshop itself, the poems were discussed and critiqued by Hughes and the other attendees. This was a very valuable experience as well as being more enjoyable than being critiqued might seem at first.
Keynote Speaker was the famous Natalie Goldberg, who was honest, funny, and inspiring. I question the wisdom of having the Keynote Speaker scheduled in the middle of the day on Saturday, however. Lunch ran from 11:45 to 12:45 with Goldberg’s presentation from 1:00 to 2:30. This was at a separate venue and open to the public, with book sales afterward. I found it rather challenging to pick up my box lunch, walk to where my car was parked on the street, drive to the new venue, eat my boxed lunch in the car, and still find a seat. Afterwards, knowing I had to reverse the action and get back for my 2:45 workshop, I decided to forgo book sales and headed back, circling the block until I finally found a parking spot near the conference. It seemed to me that this event would be better scheduled in the evening as it is at the SCWC, so there wasn’t such a feeling of having to rush.
On Sunday, there was an on-site author reading from 1:00 to 1:30, overlapping the lunch break from 12:15 to 1:30, so attendees could eat lunch first and then stay for the reading. Craig English, an award-winning author who was a professional actor for 25 years, read from his book The Anvil of Navarre. This was a wonderfully interpretive reading as you might expect from a former actor, and the book is fascinating,
In two days on Saturday and Sunday, I was able to attend eight different workshops of from 1 hour and 15 minutes to 1 hour and 30 minutes. The presenters ranged from good to outstanding. I especially enjoyed workshops by David Laskin - with whom I was able to talk with more at the Saturday night authors book signing and reception - who spoke on writing creative non-fiction; David Williams who talked about how to launch a freelance career writing for magazines; and the incredible Roy Stevenson, whom I had just read an article by in The Writer Magazine describing how he had sold more than 450 articles in just 33 months! Stevenson discussed “Writing Irresistible Query Letters” and was a fascinating and enthusiastic speaker.
WOTS was very much a whirlwind experience, but a very good one. I am hoping that my schedule will permit me to attend this coming October, when WOTS will be held September 30th and October 1st and 2nd.
