Faculty Feature: Lisa Lenard-Cook

This weekend workshop will be the perfect way to end your writing week in Taos this summer. In Lisa Lenard-Cook's class, Innovative Revision, you will be listening to the way words work in your peers' offerings and in your own work. "The not-so-secret secret of writing workshops is that, in the end, you’ll learn far more from critiquing others’ works-in-progress than you will from what others tell you about your own," says Lisa. And she's right.

This will be a weekend full of listening, and trying to understand sound, craft, technique, and tension. The class will leave you with the desire to push your prose to the very edge of greatness. As Lisa says, it will be a weekend of getting "down to the nitty-gritty of re-crafting and re-visioning so that, when you sit down at your desk post-conference, you’ll have specific tools to make what’s on the page match the picture in your head." And isn't that what we're all trying to do?

Lisa Lenard-Cook’s novels include Jim Sagel Prize-winning and PEN-shortlisted Dissonance (to be reissued in Fall 2014 by SFWP) and NMPW finalist Coyote Morning (UNM Press). She’s the author of the writing guides The Mind of Your Story (Writer’s Digest) and (with Lynn C. Miller) Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir (University of Wisconsin Press), as well as numerous trade nonfiction and ghosted books. Her short fiction has appeared in Southwest Review, Rosebud, Puerto del Sol, and other journals. She is a faculty member at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and a 2014 featured writer at the National Undergraduate Literary Conference in Ogden. With Lynn C. Miller, Lisa co-founded ABQ Writers Co-op, bosque (the magazine), and the Bosque Fiction Prize.