Another great Pikes Peak Writers Conference is already over. From reading reports of other attendees, it sounds like I missed some terrific sessions, but I attended some terrific sessions too. The first was the Friday Read & Critique, with Liz Scheier offering her comments on our opening pages. I always learn something new at these sessions, and it’s always great to have a professional’s opinion on what’s working and what isn’t.

The Flash Fiction workshop with Bret Wright was a delight, and a great addition to the usual Friday offerings. I learned a lot, laughed a lot, and thought the time went far too quickly.

Then it was off for more laughter and some stunning visuals at the Graphic Novel workshop offered by Walt and Weezie Simonson. I am in awe of the talent we saw in that room. And the Simonsons were a great addition to the conference—as friendly and accessible as anyone who has ever been on the Pikes Peak faculty.

Friday evening’s keynote speech, by Carol Berg, was a highlight I’ll always cherish. It’s not every conference that one of the keynoters is a friend, and her talk brought back wonderful memories of that early conference when I met Carol and we sat around with several others, enjoying a glass of wine in our room, laying the foundations of friendships. It was also great to have a fantasy writer up there at the podium, representing the oldest of all the storytelling forms. Thanks, Carol!

Children’s writers have the best discussions at their parties—when I walked in, the topic was poisons. And yes, we got busted by the fun police again this year. We make each other laugh, a little too loudly, I guess. So we headed for the lobby, where we had the delight of chatting with agent Cherry Weiner, who besides being a force of nature is one of the funniest women on the planet.

Saturday morning brought more great conversations, with Steve Saffel (thanks for the Spiderman pin!) and Walt and Weezie and my usual buddies. I enjoyed my manuscript critique from Pat LoBrutto, who offered some key insights into making my work shine and encouraged me to find an agent. Thanks, Pat!

And then the pitch session. Though the woman in the waiting room tried to help us relax, in truth, I’ve been through so many pitches over the years that I didn’t feel nervous. Laurie McLean opened the conversation with great ease and made the ten minutes fly. Thanks, Laurie, for making it easy to explain my stories, even though I stumbled over some of the words—more tired or nervous than I thought I was!

David Liss’s lunch talk had us all laughing—intentionally—and reminded me of my long-gone days of grad school. As a historian, I’m picky about historical fiction, but David’s talk was a great pitch for his books.

By Saturday afternoon, I was so tired that I desperately needed a nap, which I didn’t get, and my knees were aching from the hours of sitting. Still, I enjoyed Kenny Golde’s workshop on Hollywood, and David Liss’s workshop on character. And then I had reached the end of my ability to absorb anything more and disappeared for a rest. Of course, I still had the Flash Fiction prompt, “They said it couldn’t be done,” knocking around in my head, bumping up against a story my dad had told me. So I took some time to write a story and make some edits, and read it to my roommate, Janet Fogg. Janet offered a gentle critique, which incited a few more edits, and then I copied it over to make sure I got it turned in before dinner.

The awards banquet was a blast, with my fellow fantasy advocate, Cheryl Reifsnyder, receiving first place in the Children’s category, and my critique group “cousin,” Karen Albright Lin, receiving second in Mainstream. It’s always a great thing to see friends going up there to the front.

The down side to it all was that a dear friend had taken ill Saturday afternoon, and missed half the conference, huddled in her hotel room. She’s recovering well, but we missed her company.

Sunday’s workshops started off with a bang, or a thunderstorm, or a soundtrack. I went to Laura Hayden’s talk on subliminal music, and enjoyed the opportunity to actually write at a writer’s conference. And then got even more of a chance at Walt and Weezie’s First Draft workshop. Thanks to all the great writers in that room who read their work. I always love seeing the different stories that come from the same prompt, and I’ll never forget the image of rings of people surrounding a bear and her cub.

Then the last workshop—Kim Reid’s on memoir. I’ve already started reading her new book, No Place Safe: A Family Memoir, and it drew me in immediately. Thanks, Kim, for sharing the wisdom you learned along the way.

I’d agreed to drive three of the faculty to the airport, which meant I’d miss the lunch speech and the announcement of the Flash Fiction contest winners. During the fifty minutes I was gone, my story was read aloud as the first place winner. Janet collected the prize for me, and I was reminded of my father-in-law’s words—No good deed goes unpunished. So, I was sorry to miss the fun of hearing my story read aloud to the crowd, but I’m looking forward to seeing it published in Apollo’s Lyre next winter. Thanks, Bret, for the great workshop on writing Flash Fiction. I’m sure I wouldn’t have done so well without it.

And many thanks to all the great folks who put the conference together and made sure it ran as smoothly as always. It’s such a fun weekend, with plenty of work and play, old friends and new. I always meet people I really enjoy, and hear delightful stories. No wonder the Pikes Peak Writers Conference has such a great reputation. No wonder I’ve been eleven times.

This has been a week of walking through memory. Lots of things have triggered it, including reading Natalie Goldberg’s book on writing memoir, Old Friend from Far Away. She writes that memoir is the exploration of memory, of how we remember.

The next trigger actually consists of several related triggers. I have a college reunion coming up in the fall, and a high school reunion in ’09. Trying to decide whether to attend the college reunion, which is far enough away to involve air travel and hotels, I got back in touch with some friends from those days, to see whether they’re planning to attend. And I got back in touch with people I knew in high school in the same week. One offered, in his email, a brief paragraph of remembered lines from the plays we were in and commented how strange it is that memory shines such a bright light on certain scenes. Others recede into the mists.

Talking with old friends made me think about things like how we change and don’t change. Of course I’ve changed since I was on the verge of adulthood—every experience in the decades since those days has shaped my understanding of the world and of myself. But in some essentials, I haven’t changed. One friend offered a snapshot of how he remembers my personality, and those things are still true. As I see it, the underlying qualities of who I am don’t change, but how I act on those qualities and how I relate to others based on my level of understanding of my own motivations changes dramatically over the years.

Today brought two more triggers for memory. On campus today for a Conference on World Affairs talk, I walked into a building where I used to have an office, and where I once taught a large lecture class. The smell of old wood and new carpet greeted me as I faced the long flight of stairs leading up, a flight I climbed countless times years ago. I remembered professors, students, moments of being in front of the class. Good and bad memories rose up. On the way out, a young man held the door for me, and it occurred to me that he’s likely half my age. How did that happen?

But the deepest trigger is that today was Paul’s, my father-in-law’s, birthday. I think of him every day, seeing his art in my house, seeing his smile sometimes on my husband’s face. Paul died almost four years ago, and if I let myself experience it, the grief is just as fresh now as it was then. I miss the conversations we used to have, the way he’d get down on the floor and play with his grandkids, his sense of humor.

Riding home on the bus, I listened to a song that always reminds me of him, having heard it within a few weeks of his death. It’s by Bailey Jester, called “Voice Across the Water.” The line “I’d give anything right now to see you standing here” always touches my grief. But today, thinking of memory and times past, I also heard this line in a new way: “Now I find myself a prisoner on this ancient shore…” The risk of plunging too deeply into memory is losing connection with the present. The past is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Last Saturday I attended a workshop offered by Cynthia Morris through the Rocky Mountain Chapter of SCBWI. The focus was on creating a vision of success and then mapping out the immediate goals to use as stair steps to reach that vision. While I didn’t feel a great need for the goal-setting reminders, since I’m intensely focused right now on revising my manuscript, I still got a lot out of the workshop.

I attended to reconnect with some of the people in the network that Cynthia calls my “creative tribe.” I have several, overlapping, smaller tribes, but by far the biggest network of writers I’ve come to know and love and trust are children’s writers associated with RMC-SCBWI. Some live nearby and I don’t see them nearly often enough, so I was glad to have the chance to catch up, even a little.

Of the exercises and pearls of wisdom that Cynthia offered, I found two to be incredibly helpful. One was to write a letter to myself from my muse. I’m on very good terms with my muse, having shown up at the page faithfully every day for about 8 1/2 years. I show up, my muse shows up. Especially for first drafts, which sometimes flow through me as if I’m just taking dictation. So my letter offered affirmation of the mutual respect I have with my muse.

Revisions can be harder for me, which leads to the other jewel Cynthia dropped in my lap. “The creative process can be uncomfortable.” It looks so simple as I type it, but I needed to hear it. I’d been struggling with a particular revision in my book, trying to address a problem that members of my critique group, the Wild Folk of the West, had pointed out. I figured out how to work it, for the most part, but writing it made me squirm. I liked the version I already had, but could see the validity of the critique. I wrestled with it. I let it roam around in my subconscious. I wrote the new scene, not at all sure it would work. I questioned whether it fit, since the writing of it made me so uncomfortable.

After hearing Cynthia, I took to heart the premise that the creation itself can be uncomfortable. That emotion doesn’t mean the new version won’t work. In fact, as I know from my daily writing practice where sometimes the muse is sleepy and sometimes she’s on fire, a new reader probably won’t be able to tell which parts were uncomfortable and which parts flowed. That’s the magic of the process.

I attended my precinct caucus last night, though unlike the vast majority of folks there, I wasn’t a first-timer. In fact, I attended my first caucus as soon as I was eligible to vote, a few decades ago. Two years ago there were maybe ten of us at our precinct’s caucus. Last night there were 114 eligible voters from my precinct who came out on a cold, icy night to be counted. And even though we showed up in record numbers, the volunteers who ran the night were calm and collected and the mood in the room was one of patience and enthusiasm. I saw many familiar faces: folks I know only as neighbors, those I know from my kids’ schools, and even a fellow dreamworker. I sat next to a neighbor I hadn’t met before, and we had the chance to introduce ourselves while waiting for everything to begin. I love that sense of community wherever I find it, and I certainly found it last night.

Our precinct fell right in line with Colorado’s results as a whole: 2 to 1 for Obama over Clinton. One man stood up and said that Obama is the most exciting candidate our party has put forward in 40 years, and that he hasn’t been this enthusiastic about a candidate since JFK. I Some spoke eloquently for Clinton, too, and the overall mood I heard was that it’s a shame these two candidates are running in the same year, and that if they weren’t running against each other, either would be a great choice. At the end of the night, though, my precinct leader said, “Either way, we’re in for a change.”

The biggest change I see so far is in the level of enthusiasm in the Democratic Party. It’s as though we were hit by a tornado in the last decade and weren’t sure how to regroup. But now, we’re galvanized. And despite the media’s attempts to sort us out into demographic groups (men for Clinton! whites for Obama!) I think most people are choosing based on the candidate’s platform and how we think s/he will do against the Republican candidate.

I volunteered to be a delegate at the County Convention, and while I really wanted to go, I agreed to be an alternate just so we could keep the process moving last night. When my neighbor saw that I had the party platform survey already filled out and ready to turn in, he said, “You’re the kind of delegate we want. An over-achiever.” Yes, I admit it. I did my homework. So I was pleased to learn that I can attend the County Convention as an alternate, though unless I’m sitting in for a delegate, I can’t vote. But I had so much fun at my precinct caucus, I’m looking forward to the next step.

Two things tipped the scales for me on which candidate to support last night. One was Bill Clinton’s attack on Obama. While I think our country prospered under Bill Clinton’s presidency, I do wish he’d held himself to a higher moral ground. The other thing that swayed me firmly into Obama’s camp was his speech at Dr. King’s church: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf0x_TpDris

Whichever way your political leanings take you, I urge you to participate in the process. We have the potential to really change the things we don’t like about how our country is moving. Let’s move in the direction of hope instead of fear.

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to work dreams at a party, with people I had never met before. The sessions were very quick, just ten to fifteen minutes, which is why I called it Spotlight Dreamwork. We didn’t have time to explore every nuance of every symbol, but even so, the magic of dreamwork is how quickly one can get close to the heart of things.

Usually, in ten minutes of small talk, I might find out what a person does for living, what their hobbies are, where they traveled for the holidays or whether they have children. We might form impressions of each other based on hairstyle, clothes, and comfort level with chitchat. But when someone tells me a dream, and expects me to offer some insights into the meaning of the symbols of the dream, the conversation takes a much different tack. I’m much less likely to hear about someone’s career as about the challenges they faced in childhood, or the sometimes very serious challenges they face as parents. I’m much more likely to learn about a difficult relationship with a parent than about recent vacations. And I’m much less likely to make assumptions about a person based on appearances. Instead, when working dreams, I am constantly reminded of how very much we are alike at a fundamental, crucial level. I’ve yet to meet a person who isn’t carrying burdens, and I’ve yet to meet someone interested in dreams who isn’t also yearning for a deeper understanding of themselves and of life.

And so my wish for you in the new year is that you’ll remember and examine your dreams, and find answers to your questions within them.

Two weekends ago, I attended an amazing weekend retreat. If you’ve never experienced Group Projective Dreamwork, it might be a challenge to appreciate how astonishing and healing a weekend of it can be. This was the fourth time I’ve attended one of the dream retreat weekends that Billie Ortiz organizes. Jeremy Taylor offers his mentorship, and the dreams, as always, inform each other and help everyone who works them to reach a deeper level of self-understanding.

One of the side effects of getting deeply involved in dreamwork is that synchronicities begin to become more noticeable in one’s waking life. On Sunday, the final dreams we worked on triggered an amazing recitation of synchronicities that the dreamers in the room could point to as connections with the dream material. It ended with Jeremy mentioning the book Patterns that Connect, which explores archetypal patterns in art forms throughout non-technological societies around the world. He specifically mentioned crosshatching as a decorative motif. When I got home, before I told my family about my weekend, we sat down to eat and my older daughter began methodically making crosshatch patterns in the top of her slice of squash pie.

If you’re interested in some visual synchronicities, check out the blog “3191 a year of mornings”.

The number of connections between dreams that arise in a weekend, and the number of connections that can be made between two images, raises the questions, “Would there be that many connections between any small set of dreams? Does the human mind seek connections so automatically that we can find them in almost any pair of photographs?”

I’m beginning to suspect that the answer to both questions is yes, and that as a species, we’ve only begun to understand the depth and breadth of interconnectedness in our world.

Now that I’ve had a few days to catch up on sleep and deal with some of this year’s astonishingly abundant grape harvest, I can pull my thoughts together on the Rocky Mountain Chapter of SCBWI’s Fall Conference.

We had a change of locale this year, which seemed to be popular with a lot of newcomers, since the registration numbers went up and there were a lot of attendees who had never been to one of our conferences before. Personally, I found the hotel surrounded by highway and asphalt to be less appealing than the School of Mines right at the foot of the mountains, but the hotel did have a waterfall in the lobby, so we could pretend we were near Rocky Mountain spring water.

Highlights of the conference included pearls of wisdom dropped generously by Betsy James, information-packed sessions by Bethany Siegler (on website use for writers) and Elizabeth Rusch (I heard the ones on getting children to give you feedback and interviewing experts), an inspiring workshop on revision by Todd Mitchell and Laura Resau, a dynamic banquet talk by Mark Ludy, and a moving luncheon talk by Julie Anne Peters.

Aside from the formal presentations, I especially enjoyed the manuscript review session with Martha Mihalick, Associate Editor at Greenwillow Books, and not just because she liked Bone Temple. She’s smart and personable and offers feedback in a way that takes the sting out of the places where she notes what’s not working. I’ve got a great new set of questions to consider as I move into revising the manuscript again.

I also had a wonderful time talking with Laura Resau at dinner. She’s another smart and personable woman, and though I hadn’t intended to buy her second book, Red Glass, because of budget considerations, I went ahead and splurged. I’m looking forward both to enjoying the story and to studying her craft. I also added Betsy James’s trilogy and Todd Mitchell’s Traitor King to my library after hearing them speak.

Of course, it was great to see all my friends in addition to meeting new folks. Children’s writers are gracious and supportive people. They tend to be highly educated, and all of the ones I’m lucky enough to know well have enormous respect for their intended audience. When I get frustrated by the long apprenticeship this craft usually requires, and I consider walking away from it to do something—anything–else, the thought of leaving the community of writers returns me to my keyboard, ready to do more than just write stories for my own enjoyment. They show me the hurdles I still have to overcome, and then kindly bring the stepstool to help me over.

Many, many thanks to all of the hardworking volunteers who put the conference together and missed their own opportunities to network or learn in order to make sure things went well for the rest of us.

Now that it’s monsoon season with highs most days in the 90s, it must be time to start school again. Hmm. Somehow, it just doesn’t seem right to start school in mid-August, but that’s what my kids have to do. Parents, of course, have their share of homework at the start of the school year–endless forms to fill out, registrations and assessments to bring the kids to, checks to write.

For me, the beginning of school brings mixed feelings. I’m an advocate of down time for kids–not computer and TV time, but time to play and read and create. Summers are wonderful for that, and once school and homework begin, there’s much less time and opportunity for them to pursue their own interests. On the other hand, school is essential not only for the academics, but also for the social interactions with peers and teachers. As a mom, I want the best of both worlds for my kids.

The start of the school year also represents more time to dive deeply into my writing, revising, and dreamwork. One of my dream work circles takes a summer hiatus, since we’re all moms who meet during the school day, and after weeks away from our meetings, I’m feeling less grounded. On the writing front, I have two projects in revision and one emerging in first draft, and I’m itching to get at all of them more deeply. Plus there are papers to write for my Dream Work certification program. Finally, I have classes to finish preparing for. Through the Lifelong Learning program, I’ll be teaching Dream Exploration starting September 25, and Just Write starting October 30. Both are listed under Writing in the catalog, though the Dream Exploration class won’t have a writing component to it. You can find both listed here: http://bouldervalley.augusoft.net/index.cfm?fuseaction=1011&CategoryID=1&SubCategoryID=4

To all the teachers and students out there, here’s hoping for a great school year!

To be fair, it’s not entirely J.K. Rowling’s fault that I haven’t posted in so long. There was the untimely death of my cat Yoda just before I left town for a couple of weeks, the vacation with extended family, the teaching of writing classes, the receiving of critiques on two different novels from two different groups, the house-cleaning and stuff-sorting required in order to host friends for a week, the week of reunion parties with 20-odd friends (or is that 20 odd friends?), and perhaps it all adds up to an excuse, admittedly lame, for neglecting my blog.

And then, in the midst of the reunion, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows arrived. No spoilers here, though I imagine most folks who are going to read it and are worried about spoilers will have already plowed through all 759 pages.

As I witnessed the madhouse that the Boulder Bookstore became on the night of the release, and as I read the novel while admonishing my friends who read it faster not to give away anything, I began to wonder what it must be like to be J.K. Rowling, knowing that millions of people around the world were reading her work at the same time, all racing to find out what happened before someone spilled the beans.

Did her hair stand on end? Did her fingertips tingle? All that energy, focused on her work—it must have had some impact. Or was the sudden silence of all those readers just anti-climatic? Did she suffer from the literary equivalent of post-partum depression after writing “The End,” and if so, did the release of the book change her mood?

I hope it was electrifying and thrilling and fun. And I’d like to thank her for writing a ripping good tale.

But here’s something perplexing. If you look at the listing for HP 7 on Amazon, the reading level is listed as “Ages 4-8.” Now, I know Ms. Rowling did wonders for reluctant readers, but age 4? Even as a read-aloud, it might be a bit over most 4-year-olds’ heads. If you look at the “Library Binding” edition, the reading level is “Ages 9-12,” so I suspect that the first is meant to refer to school grades, rather than ages. But maybe we should just take out the hyphen. After all, I know a lot of folks in their 40s who couldn’t wait to read the finale.

Now back to our regularly over-scheduled lives.

I’ve been thinking about critiques lately, since I just handed out a novel to my take-no-prisoners critique group. These are folks who care deeply about each other, and mince no words about what’s wrong with a manuscript. Some people find it hard to take. Others seem to soak it all in with no dampening of their enthusiasm.

Me, I’m somewhere in between. It usually takes me a while between the critique and the revision to shift from feeling disappointed that my work missed the mark to having the emotional energy to work through all the comments.

Lately, though, I’ve been reconsidering a conversation I had with Jeremy Taylor several years ago, in which he described fiction as a kind of waking dream. He went on to say that those of us who create such work (and I’m guessing he would include other artists in this) are the designated dreamers of society, offering the fruits of their creation for public consumption, filling the gap for those who don’t spend time with their dreams. Certainly it’s been my experience that readers of my stories see themes and ideas that I hadn’t consciously considered when I was writing. And when the words flow through my hands into the keyboard, I rarely feel that I am actually creating them. Instead, the story comes from the same place as dreams, shaped differently, but arising from the same deep well.

So, that offers me the opportunity to gain some distance from a critique. When I work a dream in a group, I don’t feel ownership over its creation. Many of the symbols will have personal meaning for me, and over time, themes emerge in my dreams just as they do in my writing. If the novel is a waking dream, then I can view critiques as another form of projective dreamwork. Even though the members of my critique group don’t adopt the “If it were my dream…” format for their critiques, I can still recognize that their critiques are their projections onto my story. They have years of experience that lead them to notice where the plot stumbles, or the pacing slows, or the character’s actions don’t ring true. They’re happy to offer suggestions for new scenes, or plot twists, or stronger character development. But in the end, what they are implying is, “If this were my novel, I would do this.”

Recognizing that fact makes it easier to sort out which critiques to adopt and which to decline. The ones that help shape my novel into the version that I’m striving for are the ones I will use.

But, there’s another way to look at critiques, which I’ve learned from discussions with both Carol Berg and Steve Saffel. If a critiquer offers a suggestion, or if several people offer several suggestions in the same place, that means that something isn’t quite working at that point in the story. Critiques point to the problem, but don’t always offer the right solution. So if I read a comment and disagree with it, that doesn’t mean I should just ignore it. Instead, I should try to understand why my critiquer stumbled at that point and make my changes based on that.

Of course, much of this is intellectualizing. When the group spends a good chunk of time at our July meeting telling me what’s wrong with my novel, I expect I’ll still have an emotional reaction and need some time before I dive into changes. But I hope that by thinking about my work as a waking dream, I’ll be able to shorten that time.