Leader: Rebecca Otowa
Date: Sunday, September 23, 2012 (followed by early dinner)
Time: 13:30-16:30
Fee: 2,000 yen for JAT/SWET members; 2,500 for non-members
Place: Kyoto Otani Hall Meeting Room #3 (map)
Address: 〒600-8164　京都市下京区諏訪町通六条下る上柳町215 (10 minutes' walk from JR Kyoto Stn)
Reservations: kansai[at]swet.jp
Participant limit: 15 (book your place early)
 

Come play with us! Here’s a chance to put the sparkle back into your writer’s eye. A fun, hands-on workshop with lots of different games, exercises and challenges.
This workshop is for any and all writers – fiction, non-fiction, poets, journalists, people who think of their life’s work as wordcraft or people who just like jotting things down once in a while.
There will be something for everyone. And no rules, no MFA guidelines, no elitism. Just playing with words. Anyone can do it, anyone can have fun.

Some things to look forward to:
(Just a taste of what to expect from the workshop's activities)

• Bring a book by one of your favorite authors (I know how hard it is to pick one!) and share a paragraph.
• Word work – Magic Words
• Sentence work – Steve Martin’s Advice on Plagiarism
• Paragraph work – The Starting Sentence

What to bring: Paper and writing materials, whatever you are most comfortable with – no electronics please. Also, bring a book you love. Be prepared to share one paragraph and say why you love that author’s writing.
What NOT to bring: Computers and other electronic devices.

See you there!

Profile:
Rebecca Otowa was born in Southern California, U.S.A. and spent her teenage years in Brisbane, Australia. Intrigued at first by the idea of writing Japanese characters, she took the pilot course in Japanese offered at the local high school and followed it with a BA (Hons.) in Japanese at University of Queensland. She arrived in Kyoto April 10, 1978 on a scholarship from the Japanese Government and has never left since! After getting an MA in Buddhist Studies from Otani University, she married her sweetheart, Toshiro, the 19th generation scion of a 350-year-old farmhouse in the Shiga mountains. In 2009. Otowa completed At Home in Japan, a collection of essays about her outer and inner life. Her other great love, drawing, is evident in the book, which is extensively illustrated, with a photo insert as well. She is currently working on a lavishly illustrated children's book describing the adventures of an 11-year-old boy on a homestay trip in regional Japan (NOT Tokyo). She continues to draw and paint and write in her spare time, and to grow vegetables and roses, and read many books, including her favorite authors, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ursula LeGuin.