Writing Between the Worlds:
A Summer Writer's Retreat with Linda Kohanov
As a best-selling author and a journalist with 20 years experience in magazine and newspaper writing, Linda Kohanov regularly receives manuscripts and inquiries from people interested in getting published. “It’s really quite amazing the amount of material that comes through my office,” she marvels. “I actually spend a significant amount of time looking through the heartfelt stories and powerful experiences people work so hard to capture in writing. And I do send the more highly developed ideas and sample chapters on to my agent and/or publisher. Rarely, however, do these projects make it to publication. Over the last six years, I’ve gained a deeper understanding of why through extensive conversations with my agent, editor, and other published authors I’ve come to know.”
What is that extra something that publishers are looking for? How do you capture of the interest of an agent who will truly champion your work? What pitfalls do writers face in the publishing world? How do you write a query letter to an agent? What does a winning book proposal cover? When is self-publishing the best option, and how do you go about it? When and why should you consider magazine/newspaper outlets, and how do you go about tapping this market?
How do you get your writing to the level that will attract readers? Why do even some of the most emotionally arresting, well written, strongly reviewed projects sell dismally, making publishers increasingly skeptical of personal experience narratives? When does deeply felt personal experience warrant the wider audience publishers are seeking? How do you turn your most significant ideas into words that captivate, inform, and literally change readers’ lives?
And most importantly, why should you write, regardless of whether you are planning to be published?
“The answers to these questions are way too complex for me to convey in a simple email or phone conversation with the writers who contact me,” Linda emphasizes. “Good writing seems so clear, so simple, so straight forward, so obvious, but as most writers will tell you, it’s hard work. Hard work with a big payoff, that is—in personal satisfaction, in greater awareness of yourself and the world around you, in the very development of your soul.”
“While I have been successful commercially as a writer,” she continues, “it has been an amazing journey of expanding consciousness to learn how to translate pure experience into narratives that move others. I have been told many times that the power of my writing is being able to say what others have felt but could never translate into words, making scientific and philosophical ideas accessible by relating them to my own experience, and grounding mystical experiences into this world. This is what I will be teaching writing wise, in addition to sharing how I got an agent and the process we went through to find just the right publisher, in addition to other outlets like newspaper and magazine writing which I have also done, and as you know, can lead to interest from book publishers.”
Autobiographical narrative will be a significant topic in the workshop. It is the basis of what made Linda’s books unexpectedly successful, allowing her to draw together a wide variety of philosophical, historical, psychological, mystical, and equestrian-oriented subjects.
"As for the horses’ involvement in our retreat,” Linda reveals, “I will be facilitating experiences with them that open sensory awareness, intuition, and creativity, coaching participants in doing some short writing projects about these experiences. Then I will be assisting people in editing, ‘reaching between the lines’ to go deeper into drawing out the most powerful yet most elusive nonverbal experiences and translating them into words.
“Part of my strength as a writer also came from playing and writing about music for many years, again taking the nonverbal and translating it into words. We will have some experiences with music, both listening to it and playing it (no musical experience needed for this), purely for the effect it has on switching your mind to a more creative, nuance-sensitive channel. And we will be spending some time in nature, at various times of the day, for essentially the same inspirational reasons. During the week, I will also meet privately with each person about any projects they are working on, and for anyone who is working on a particular project, this time could be maximized by sending me a project description and an excerpt ahead of time.”
For this workshop, Linda would like to interview each participant by phone to find out their writing goals, challenges, and any special projects they’d like to work on during the week. Please send a letter of interest with your contact information and a brief description of your writing experience and/or goals to rasa@theeponacenter.com Make sure you include your phone number. For more information, contact the Epona office: booking@theeponacenter.com or 520-455-5908.