Wide Open Writing Welcomes Robin Gaines

We’re here. Baby steps into 2022. We made it through another uncertain year of an uncertain virus. But we’ve got this. We’re writers. Writers work with uncertainty, the unknown, or, if known, unsure of the best way to get it down on the page from where it lives and breathes within us, the writers, to others, the readers. But that’s the magic of it. Pulling the colorful silk scarves of ideas from our sleeves. And like all good magicians, the more we practice our craft, the effortless the trick appears.

Tricking the inspirational part of our brain, (the anterior superior temporal gyrus), to gently wake the good stuff, the dormant images and scenes, the imaginary dialogues and muted characters, the murky storylines that lay buried in the deep mess of the everyday our brain must navigate—well, that is why we write. To conjure up the story you need to tell because you’re the only one who can tell it.

Let’s unearth those buried pieces of silk and weave them into something magical.

Bring a fresh notebook to today’s session. One that you reserve only for writing to prompts for 2022. A Prompt Journal where you’ll free form write to a weekly prompt for the month of February. You can time yourself or not. Write to a word count, or not. Anything goes. Interpret the prompts any way you choose. But for February, you’ll get a new prompt every Monday. Hopefully, this will kick start a new story idea or poem, a forgotten memory for the memoir, an insight into the connection between subjects for an essay. 

We’ll start Sunday’s session with a series of prompts to get you going.

Robin Gaines’s debut novel, Invincible Summers, was published by ELJ Editions in June 2016. Since its release it has been awarded a Shelf Unbound 2018 Best Indie Notable 100 Book; Runner Up 2018 in General Fiction at the Florida Book Festival; and received Honorable Mentions in 2017 at the Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Beach Read Book Festivals.

Before its publication, Invincible Summers was a semi-finalist in the Iowa Short Fiction Award & John Simmons Short Fiction Award for 2014.

Her fiction and nonfiction has been published in various newspapers, magazines, and journals. An essay, “Rejecting Rejection,” is forthcoming in Beyond the Plots Anthology. Robin is hard at work on her zillionth draft of her second novel.

You can sign up for free on Eventbrite, or you can join us via ZOOM LINK.