Description

Weeding & Pruning is a manuscript group composed of no more than five Writing It Up in the Garden writers led by the brilliant and kind Elaine Apthorp who has a built-in punctuation genius and an infectious joy for the written word.

The format:

-During a 10-week trimester, each of the five writers has three opportunities to be on the hot seat with their manuscript.

-Hot-seaters send their works-in-progress––up to 2600 words––four days ahead of the meeting, and the rest of the group must review.

-Feedback is prescriptive, gentle and honest.

-All forms are welcome: novel-in-progress, short story, poetry, song, essay, memoir.

Our marvelous instructor is Elaine Apthorp. If you are interested, please let us know, and submit a short excerpt of writing or a song here.

Elaine Apthorp is a truly remarkable teacher, writer, reader and mentor. She teaches from the heart as well as from the head. Working closely with the writer and the writing, her mission is to comprehend, appreciate, and nurture the project and the creative soul who is choosing to engage in it; help a comrade writer discover and achieve their intentions on the page; find out what the writer means to do and offer suggestions about choices one might make that could further those objectives.

Elaine has a BA summa cum laude from Williams College (double major in English and Religion), and an MA and a Ph.D. in Literature from UC Berkeley. In the course of her career at Berkeley, San Jose State University, and Milton Academy, she taught literature, creative writing, U.S. history, and philosophy. She’s published articles, essays, and reviews in a number of journals and anthologies (Legacy, Women’s Studies, San Jose Studies, TheEncyclopedia of New England Culture, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, among others); a one-act play A Play At The Plate, was produced by Reality Check theatre in San Jose; a short story, “Stealing Home,” appears in the anthology Hot Ticket. Over the last several years she’s been developing a four-volume series of novels from one of which “Stealing Home” was excerpted.