Be Well Be Here in collaboration with the Concord Festival of Authors and

Concord-Carlisle Adult & Community Education present

Write for WellBeing Workshop with WRITE CONCORD!

Develop your innate skills as a storyteller! The CFA Write for WellBeing Workshop invites you to explore your natural instincts as a writer and observer in order to articulate wisdom gleaned from experience. Through mindful writing exercises, you’ll tap into essential elements of how we create compelling narratives and transform ideas into possibility on the page. Discover mindful techniques that allow your creativity to flow and give you confidence to progress with your writing project.

All levels and genres are welcome!

A FREE writing workshop sponsored by the CFA and the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library

Be Well Be Here happily collaborates with the Concord Festival of Authors 2021 to present

Writing Historical Fiction: To Muck and Fudge

Led online by celebrated author Allison Amend

Writing historical fiction requires specificity of time and place, often gathered from authorial research. But how does an author set aside scholarly inquiry to focus on fiction-- character, conflict, voice, etc.? In other words, how do we get out of the books to get into our book? This workshop offers techniques for re-creating historical moments to suit contemporary narratives, and offers suggestions for avoiding historical fiction traps. Explore new ways to turn your story of time and place into a compelling and memorable work of fiction with celebrated author Allison Amend. Learn more about Allison’s fascination with historical fiction and her mindful writing process in her essay, Celebrating Those Whom History Has Forgotten. Discover her wise and witty approach to creating memorable narratives in this entertaining interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Learn more at www.concordfestivalofauthors.org/writing-workshop-historical-fiction

$22 for the session. Register to receive your Zoom link.

Be Well Be Here offers scholarship and subsidies so ALL can be included regardless of ability to pay - simply fill out the BWBH Scholarship Form.

Allison Amend, a Chicago native, graduated from Stanford University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is the author of the IPPY award-winning short story collection Things That Pass for Love and the novels A Nearly Perfect Copy and Stations West, which was a finalist for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award. Her most recent book, Enchanted Islands, was on the longlist for the International Dublin Award. Allison teaches creative writing at Lehman College, CUNY, in New York City, where she has visited every museum, all 115 of them.

How lucky we are to Be nourished by the amazing choices at Debra’s Natural Gourmet in West Concord MA - and by the mindful wisdom of beloved Concord business owner, Debra Stark! Join Debra for a conversation about the life and times of Debra’s Natural Gourmet to hear wildly engaging and hilarious stories about characters met along the way. Emceed by BWBH founder Lara Wilson, whom you’ll find gathering unique, tasty items at Debra’s at least once a week!

For more info, visit: concordfestivalofauthors.org/debras-natural-gourmet

Be Well Be Here happily collaborates with the Concord Festival of Authors 2021 to present:

Your First 100 Words:

Grounding Readers in Your Fiction

Led online by acclaimed short story author Pamela Painter

Most readers will engage with a story if they feel grounded in some aspect of that story’s world. Whether physically grounded in setting, emotionally grounded in character, or logistically grounded in the human situation, it’s crucial to establish for readers early on a world they recognize, and to convey what matters in that world. In this advanced craft seminar, we’ll discuss techniques for grounding your stories, analyze published examples, and provide exercises to help you put it in practice.

Learn more at www.concordfestivalofauthors.org/writing-workshop-short-stories

$22 for the session. Register to receive your Zoom link.

Be Well Be Here offers scholarship and subsidies so ALL can be included regardless of ability to pay - simply fill out the BWBH Scholarship Form.

Pamela Painter is the author of four story collections, Getting to Know the Weather, which won the Great Lakes College Award Award for First Fiction, The Long and Short of It, Wouldn’t You Like to Know and Ways to Spend the Night.   She is also the co-author with Anne Bernays of the widely-used textbook, now in its third college edition, What If?  Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers.  

She has received grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, has won three Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review’s  John Cheever Award for Fiction.  Painter’s stories have been presented on National Public Radio, and on stage by Stage Turner, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, in Los Angeles and London by Cedering Fox’s Word Theatre Company.  She appeared with writer, Anthong Doerr, at Word Theatre’s Voices in association with NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where her two stories were read by actors Connor Paolo and Michael Zegan.  

Beginning in the late 80s, Painter was perhaps the first writer to teach a workshop entirely devoted to the short short story at Emerson College in Boston. Many of her students have published stories, won flash fiction awards and become publishers themselves of flash fiction—two examples are Rose Metal Press and Quick Fiction.  Painter wrote the Afterword for Rose Metal Press’s Brevity and Echo: An Anthology of Short Short Stories made up of the work of Emerson students whose stories had been published and/or won awards in the real world of flash.  

Sponsored by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library

Mystery Night

Casting Call: How We Find Our Characters

Saturday, October 31

at 7:00 pm

REGISTER

Register TODAY to discover how celebrated mystery writers create memorable characters!

Join us at the Concord Festival of Authors for the LGBTQ Memoir event with celebrated authors Alex Marzano-Lesnevich and Michelle Bowdler. BWBH founder Lara Wilson emcees this conversation about crafting authentic, unforgettable personal narratives that reveal deep aspects of our humanity.

About the Authors

Michelle Bowdler’s book, Is Rape a Crime?, published in July 2020, has been long-listed for a 2020 National Book Award in Nonfiction. Michelle is a recipient of a 2017 Barbara Deming Memorial Award for non-fiction and has been a Fellow at Ragdale and MacDowell Colony. She has been published in the New York Times and in the anthologies The Anatomy of Silence (Red Press) and We Rise to Resist: Voices from a New Era in Women’s Political Action (McFarland). Her essays: Eventually You Tell Your Kids and Babelogue were both nominated for Pushcart Prizes.

Michelle has worked in the public health field for years on issues of addiction, violence prevention, sexual health, HIV education and prevention. She has been involved, as well, for over a decade working on social justice issues related to rape and crimes of violence. Currently, she has the pleasure and honor of working as Executive Director of Health & Wellness at a major university in Boston where her work involves efforts to provide excellent sexual assault prevention and treatment for students in addition to mental health and health care.

Michelle Bowdler is a graduate of Brandeis University, where she studied and fell in love with literature and writing, and of the Harvard School of Public Health, where she learned that so much of healthcare access and outcomes have a social and cultural component. She is married to a wonderful woman and they have two awesome children.

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE, the Prix des libraires du Quebec 2020, and the Prix France Inter-JDD, an award for one book of any genre in the world. Named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, Bustle, Book Riot, The Times of London, The Guardian, Paris Match, Lire, Telerama, and The Sydney Press Herald, it was an Indie Next Pick and a Junior Library Guild selection, long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, short-listed for the CWA Gold Dagger, a finalist for a New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award, and has been translated into ten languages.

The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Boston Globe, Oxford American, Harper’s, and many other publications.

Alex earned their BA at Columbia University, their JD at Harvard Law School, and their MFA at Emerson College. They are now an assistant professor at Bowdoin College and live in Portland, Maine, with an enormous puppy.

Join award-winning author Ron Maclean for the Concord Festival of Authors 2020 Short Story Writing Workshop! All CFA 2020 Writing Workshops sponsored by Be Well Be Here are live through Zoom.

Your First 100 Words:

Grounding Readers in Your Fiction

Most readers will engage with a story if they feel grounded in some aspect of that story’s world. Whether physically grounded in setting, emotionally grounded in character, or logistically grounded in the human situation, it’s crucial to establish for readers early on a world they recognize, and to convey what matters in that world. In this advanced craft seminar, we’ll discuss techniques for grounding your stories, analyze published examples, and provide exercises to help you put it in practice.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28 at 4:00 - 5:30 pm

Space is limited at a discounted rate of $15. Apply for a scholarship here.

Ron MacLean is author of the story collections We Might as Well Light Something On Fire and Why the Long Face? and the novels Headlong and Blue Winnetka Skies. MacLean’s fiction has appeared widely in magazines including GQ, Narrative, Fiction International, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of the Frederick Exley Award for Short Fiction and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. He holds a Doctor of Arts from the University at Albany, SUNY, and teaches at GrubStreet in Boston.

Interested in reading, writing and the literary life? Join us at the online Concord Festival of Authors 2020! The 28th annual CFA, curated by Be Well Be Here founder Lara Wilson, features dozens of celebrated writers at over 25 virtual literary events on October 16 - 31, 2020.

Events on Saturday, October 24, sponsored by the Concord Free Public Library, include:

Breakfast with the Authors 9:00 - 10:30 am

This popular event, hosted by Dr. Suzanne Koven, features celebrated authors Adrienne Brodeur (Wild Game), Caroline Leavitt (With of Without You) and Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)

Young Adult Writers 4:00 - 5:00 pm

Join the YA conversation with Jennifer De Leon (Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From), Susan Kaplan Carlton (In the Neighborhood of True), and Marcella Pixley (Trowbridge Road - longlisted for the National Book Award)

Children’s Authors 7:00 - 8:00 pm

Get comfy with your kids for an online discussion with children’s authors Rajani LaRocca (Midsummer’s Mayhem) and Susan Tan (Cilla Lee-Jenkins: Future Author Extraordinaire)

To register, visit ConcordFestivalofAuthors.org

Join Be Well Be Here founder, Lara Wilson, as she welcomes celebrated author, Jennifer Haigh, Keynote Speaker of the Concord Festival of Authors, who will be introduced by Helen Elaine Lee.

Why Stories Still Matter

In a time of national crisis – political, medical, financial, environmental and moral – storytelling is more important than ever. Novelist Jennifer Haigh discusses what literature has to teach us, and why it is urgently necessary in these troubled times.

Jennifer Haigh is a novelist and short story writer. Her sixth book, the novel Heat and Light, won a 2017 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NPR.  Her previous books – Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers, Mrs. Kimble, and the story collection News From Heaven -- have won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in fiction, and have been published in eighteen languages.  Her short stories have been published widely, in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Best American Short Stories and many other places.  She has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.  A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she currently teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at UMass Boston. 

Helen Elaine Lee is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School whose first novel, The Serpent's Gift, was published by Atheneum and her second novel, Water Marked, was published by Scribner. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Hanging Loose, and Solstice Literary Magazine. She has written about leading creative writing workshops in prison in a New York Times essay, “Visible Men”.  Her novel, “Pomegranate,” will be published by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books, in 2022.  Helen is Professor of Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT and Director of MIT’s Program in Women’s & Gender Studies.

Join award-winning author Whitney Scharer for the Concord Festival of Authors 2020 Historical Fiction Writing Workshop online! All CFA 2020 Writing Workshops are sponsored by Be Well Be Here.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21 at 4:00 - 5:30 pm Register for your Zoomline

Turning Fact into Fiction

Historical novels based on real people or real events abound, but incorporating historical events and figures into a narrative can be complicated and confusing. Writers wonder: how much research do I have to do? How can I successfully write about a place and time that feels utterly different from my own life? What are the rules for fictionalizing the life of a real person? The truth is that there’s no one right way to write fiction about the past, but there are tools and guidelines you can use to be comfortable with your choices. In this interactive talk, we’ll discuss the purpose of historical fiction, take a look at some examples of successful projects, discuss research techniques, and more. 

Space is limited at a discounted rate of $15. Apply for a scholarship here.

Whitney Scharer’s first novel, The Age of Light, based on the life of pioneering photographer Lee Miller, was a Boston Globe and IndieNext bestseller and named one of the best books of 2019 by Parade, Glamour Magazine, Real Simple, Refinery 29, Booklist and Yahoo. Internationally, The Age of Light won Le prix Rive Gauche à Paris, was a coups de couer selection from the American Library in Paris, and has been published or is forthcoming in over a dozen other countries.

Whitney has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts and Ragdale, a St. Botolph Emerging Artists Grant, and a Somerville Arts Council Artists Fellowship. Her short fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications including Vogue, The Telegraph, The Tatler, and Bellevue Literary Review. She holds a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Whitney teaches fiction in the Boston area and is a co-founder of the Arlington Author Salon, a quarterly reading series. For more information, visit WhitneyScharer.com

Join award-winning novelist Steve Almond for this event as part of in his writing series, Workshops for Democracy, featured at the Concord Festival of Authors 2020. All CFA Writing workshops sponsored by Be Well Be Here are live online.

Where Your Story Starts: Doubt and Disequilibrium

Too often in our lives (off the page and on) we seek refuge in a sense of assurance and psychological stability. But our most intense and lasting experiences are ones that involve doubt and disequilibrium. So what happens when we focus on those moments, when we allow ourselves to return to those lost weeks and months and years? Looking at the work of Charles D’Ambrosio, James Baldwin, Lorrie Moore, Cheryl Strayed, and other modern masters, we’ll dig deep into this troubled terrain, and use an in-class writing assignment to discover what truths we can reveal.

Sunday, October 18 at 7:30 - 9:00 pm

Space is limited at a discounted rate of $15. Apply for a scholarship here.

This is a Workshop for Democracy, designed by Steve Almond. Steve will be contributing 100% of his teaching pay to the organization Black Votes Matter. Students pay a discounted fee of $15 to Be Well Be Here for the workshop, and donate a greater amount to a candidate or cause of their choosing - perhaps $25, $50 or $100. At the opening of the workshop, we will briefly discuss making contributions as an active way to participate in our democracy, and how to be citizens of good faith in this vital moment.

Steve Almond is the celebrated author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction, including the New York Times Bestsellers “Candyfreak” and “Against Football.” His work has appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the New York Times Magazine, The Pushcart Prize, and elsewhere. For four years, Steve hosted the New York Times Dear Sugars podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed. He lives in Arlington, with his wife and three children. For more information, visit SteveAlmondJoy.org

LIVE Online Presentation sponsored by the

Friends of the Concord Free Public Library

2020 Ruth Ratner Miller Memorial Award

for Excellence in American History WINNER

Jill Lepore

Friday, October 16

at 7:00 pm

REGISTER

Jill Lepore’s latest book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, has been longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in Nonfiction

SOLD OUT! Join CFA curator and Be Well Be Here founder, Lara Wilson, for a Concord Festival of Authors Wednesday Writing Workshop that celebrates your innate skills as a storyteller. We’ll experiment with mindful awareness practices that tap into the essential elements of your story and transform ideas into possibility on the page. Discover techniques that allow your creativity to flow and give you confidence to progress with your writing process. Feel free to bring work-in-progress to share! $15. Registration required on-line at BeWellBeHere.org or by calling 978-203-2825.

Lara JK Wilson’s prize-winning short fiction has been published in The Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, American Fiction, Printers Row, and the Chicago Tribune Book Section, among others. She was awarded a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fiction Fellowship and fiction scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, as well as recognition from the Nelson Algren Awards and the Mark Twain Award for Fiction. Lara taught master fiction workshops for a decade and served on the board of directors of Grub Street in Boston for six years. Currently, she is a board member of the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, where she curates the Authors Series, Mindfulness Programming, and the Concord Festival of Authors.

Finding Inspiration for Fiction Writing

Aspiring writers are often encouraged to write what we know, but many great works of fiction are set in times and places not known first-hand by their authors. How do we use our imaginations to take us into territory we’ve never charted before? Join us for the first Wednesday Writing Workshop on October 16 as part of the Concord Festival of Authors. In this discussion and guided writing session with award-winning fiction writer, Virginia Pye, we’ll explore unexpected sources of inspiration: anecdotes passed down in families, newspaper articles that resemble fictional plots, overheard snippets of conversation, old photographs, and more. We'll train ourselves to spot story ideas in our daily lives and in what we read and experience through art, movies, and even music. Using photos and other writing prompts, we’ll embark on imaginative journeys of our own.

Workshop held at non-profit Be Well Be Here, 91 Main Street, Suite 302, Concord. $15. Space is limited. Registration required at BeWellBeHere.org or by calling 978-203-2825.