The mission of Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA), “has been to keep in balance our passion for excellence in writing as an art form and our passion for using writing as a methodology to further social justice.”
Julie is trained in and adheres to the practices outlined in Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and with Others, Oxford University Press, to create a safe place for all writers, no matter what their background and prior experience to write. Schneider’s book has a companion DVD, Tell Me Something I Can’t Forget by Florentine Films. In 2013, her book about writing as as a spiritual practice, How the Light Gets In, was published by Oxford Press.
Everyone is a writer. You are a writer. All over the world, in every culture, human beings have carved into stone, written on parchment, birch bark, or scraps of paper, and sealed into letter—their words. Those who do not write stories and poems on solid surfaces tell them, sing them, and, in so doing, write them on the air. Creating with words is our continuing passion. We dream stories; we make up stories, poems, sounds and tell them to ourselves. All alone, we write. We also write with others. Every time we open our door at the end of a workday and say, “You’ll never believe what that [bleep] said to me today….” We create story. “I was minding my own business, and go right into my face! And then he said…” Already we are creating character, voice, suspense — story. It may not be committed to paper, but the artist, the writer is at work.
– Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and With Others, Founder of Amherst Writers & Artists
Enjoy this film featuring some of the women who wrote in the weekly writing group at Mary’s Place which led to the book Original Voices.
In the forward, Pat Schneider wrote, “Original Voices is about revolution. It dares to value voices that have not only been excluded from our definitions of literary art; they have been excluded from acceptance across all of the lines of ordinary human dialogue. … Here they speak for themselves.”