Susan M. Tiberghien

Greetings!

It's soon spring but there is still lots of snow on the Alps. The Geneva Writers' Group is getting ready to celebrate its 20th Anniversary, June 8. We started in a small café, about 18 of us, meeting upstairs until there were too many of us. We moved to the Geneva Press Club and are now over 180 writers. Our members choose the workshops that interest them, there are critiquing sessions, panels, readings. For the anniversary celebration, there will be the first Geneva Writers' Group Literary Prizes and the 12th volume of our review, Offshoots, Writing from Geneva. Check our website for more details, www.genevawritersgroup.org.

And before that, I will be traveling to the States for my spring tour of workshops in Washington DC, NYC, and Boston. For over ten years I have been teaching at Hudson Valley Writers' Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY, for the Writers' Center in Bethesda, MD, and more recently for Grub Street in Boston, MA. Along with these craft workshops, I have been combining my interest in writing with my interest in Jungian psychology, and teaching workshops at Jungian Centers and Institutes on the East Coast. Writing and teaching has built a bridge for me between the States and Europe, for which I am increasingly grateful.

I have added a tab for a blog to my website and transferred the personal essays about about my life in Europe, married to a Frenchman and bringing up six children in five different countries.

To close this homepage, I return to my most recent book, One Year to a Writing Life, that offers twelve workshops in the art and craft of writing. The book is in its 10th printing and has sold just over 20,000 copies. And I have recently signed the contract for the Chinese translation.

From the introduction:
Ask writers to define the writing life and you will get many answers. Annie Dillard says that it is "life at its most free." For Stephen King, it's a "brighter, more pleasant place." From Brenda Ueland to John Gardner, writers have been offering counsel to encourage people to write. And all the words come back to one fundamental truth: a writing life is a creative life....

For me it has become a life that awakens to birdsong in early morning, that lingers with sunlight in late afternoon. It is a life that slows down to touch each moment, a life that deepens from an inner source. I was fifty years old when I started along the way. I had been writing letters, various papers, journal entries, but not thinking of myself as a writer. My life was full yet I longed for something more. Once I acknowledged that I wanted to be a writer, the well within me filled with fresh creativity....

One Year to a Writing Life presents twelve workshops drawn from over fifteen years of teaching. The lessons dovetail inspiration and instruction. The first component, inspiration, comes from my trust in writing as a way of life. A trust nourished by practice.... The second component, instruction, comes from my appreciation of writing as a process. We sharpen our writing skills, clarify our thinking, and deepen our awareness of ourselves and of the world around us....

There is a light within each of us, the light that we bring into the world. ONE YEAR TO A WRITING LIFE will lead you to this light. With your words, you become a light bearer in the world."

Thank you for your visit.