March 11th Meeting Cancelled

 Dear Sierra Writers,

Given community concerns over COVID 19 we have decided to cancel the Sierra Writers Meeting scheduled for Wednesday, March 11. We are following Sierra College's lead through March and hope to resume with our regularly scheduled meeting on Wednesday, April 8. While the risk posed by COVID 19 may be small at this time, we have decided that an abundance of caution is appropriate at this time. 

After all, better safe than sorry!

Sincerely,

Christopher Hall
Sierra Writers Speaker/Meeting Coordinator

Diane Meissler's presentation will be rescheduled!

Grow Your Soil!: Harness the Power of the Soil Food Web to Create Your Best Garden Ever is a lighthearted look at soil biology and healthy gardening.

Diane will read a few selections from her recently published book, lead some writing exercises, and talk about her writing process and how she stumbled into getting published.

Amazon Buy Link

"Even experienced gardeners will learn something new from this delightful and practical guide." - Kristin Ohlson, author of The Soil Will Save Us

Diane Meissler is a gardener with more than 50 years' experience and a certified permaculture designer. She writes a monthly column for The Union.

Getting Inside Others’ Skin in Poetry and Prose - February 12th

Getting Inside Others’ Skin in Poetry and Prose

How do we get out of our own sensibilities and understand the perspective of those who may show up in our writing, such as a younger version of ourselves or one of our family members? In this workshop, we’ll examine poems and passages that effectively take us out of the writer’s experience and into someone else’s. Then we’ll use some of the techniques we discover to write sketches or poems of our own.

Ingrid is inspired by the wild nature of California, her writing students, her children, and poets such as Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Ellen Bass, Tracy K. Smith, Indigo Moor, and Molly Fisk. When it comes to writing poetry, she believes in Richard Hugo’s advice: “You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.” Her philosophy about the creative process is that we must always be aware of its two-fold nature: first comes the expression itself, and that must be recognized as something quite fragile. Then, ideally, the sharing of that writing can follow. The value of critiques and support from a community of fellow writers cannot be underestimated, and Ingrid deeply values the inspiration and guidance she receives from other writers in Nevada County and beyond.

Ingrid’s collection of poetry, It Started with the Wild Horses, explores how our experiences and relationships become memory; how encountering the wilderness outside our doors shapes us; and how a sense of place tells us who we are. Readers travel from Greece to California, from the Sierra Nevada to the rivers of Washington, from adolescence to parenthood, from classroom to orchard, and from grief to hope.