Everyone’s story matters and is worth telling and sharing, so the Vineyard Haven library offers “The Power of Memoir” with Caroline Joy Adams on Monday, Oct. 28, from 2 to 4 pm. According to the library’s press release, Adams, a native New Yorker, author of four published books and a college professor who now splits her time between Arizona and New England, suggests that it is worthwhile for you to focus your energy on writing short, powerful pieces recounting important and memorable experiences you have had in your life.
The community is invited to sign up for this free, inspiring short writing workshop to get words and creativity flowing. And, the release says, there’s no need to be intimidated by the idea of committing to a book-length autobiography recounting your entire life’s experiences, joys, or challenges. Rather, there are moments in time that are worth capturing, that have led to insights or perhaps changed you in deep ways, that others can learn from or relate to. These brief bits of life experience can, Adams says, with some helpful guidance and encouragement, easily be turned into short memoirs, which can be written and shared in various forms. Even a few powerful pages, told with passion and purpose, can have the power to truly make a difference to others, regardless of whether you have an audience of five friends or family members, or five thousand fans.
A devoted writing teacher and a lover of words, stories, and beautiful images, Adams is also an artist and photographer. A key part of her life mission is to encourage and inspire everyone to bring out their own most powerful words from within, the release says, and shape them into finished form, offering others the gift of gaining insight into who the writer is, while illuminating their own life journeys at the same time.
Born into a New York publishing family, Caroline’s father, Arvid Knudsen, was for a time the editor-in-chief of Children’s Books at McGraw Hill Publishing, and inspired her to become a writer herself. A voracious reader from a very young age, Adams says she still cannot pass a bookstore, anywhere, without stopping and buying at least one new volume to add to her collection. She is a passionate advocate for independent bookstores and when visiting the Vineyard she browses both Edgartown Books and Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven.
Currently taking a semester off from teaching to spend time writing a new book and a screenplay, Adams is now offering a series of free writing workshops at various public libraries in New England in order to help ignite creativity and foster writing communities.
Everyone is welcome to attend the writing workshop, and experience level doesn’t matter. If you are more interested in writing fiction or poetry, you are also welcome to attend, as those are also forms of storytelling.
For more information, contact Anne McDonough at the Vineyard Haven library, 508-696-4211.
