The Discipline of the Writer's Life
with Joyce Maynard

In this three-hour lecture (with plent y of room for questions and participation), longtime journalist and fiction writer Joyce Maynard will examine the skills necessary -- separate from those of actually constructing first-rate work -- for a person to realistically pursue the life of a full-time freelance writer, as she has managed to for over 30 years. Areas Maynard will examine include establishing a writing routine, a writer's tool box (eight items a writer can't be without), confronting so-called "writer's block" (Maynard doesn't believe in it, which is why it's not a factor in her daily life).

Drawing on plentiful examples from her own long and productive career, Maynard will look at the frequently unlikely origins of ideas, the pacing of a writing day, useful emergency methods for a writer's most desperate, hopeless or simply empty-headed moments, and the difference between constructive alternatives to sitting at the computer, and sheer avoidance.

Participants in this evening lecture need bring nothing but a familiarity with the challenges of spending one's day writing-or the fantasy that no challenges exist.

Joyce Maynard has been a journalist and fiction writer for over thirty years, beginning her career while still in her teens, as a writer for Seventeen, and with the publication of a New York Times Magazine cover story, "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life" that formed the basis for her first book, Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties.

Since then, she has been a reporter and feature writer for The New York Times, an on-air commentator and essayist with CBS Radio, and, for eight years, published a weekly column, "Domestic Affairs, with The New York Times Syndicate, which ran in over fifty papers nationwide. Author of over a dozen "Hers" and "Lives" columns in the New York Times, she has also published personal essays in O, the Oprah Magazine, More, Mademoiselle, Newsweek, Self, The San Francisco Examiner, Redbook, and in Harrowsmith and Parenting magazines (where she had monthly columns) and numerous other publications.

On radio, her essays have appeared for many years on NPR's "All Things Considered". She has also appeared a number of times as a performer with the New York-based storytelling collective, The Moth. Author of four novels (including To Die For, later adapted into a film starring Nicole Kidman, and the recently-published novel, The Usual Rules), she has also published a collection of first- person essays, Domestic Affairs, and the best-selling memoir, At Home in the World, now translated into seven languages.

A frequent teacher of writing at workshops and schools around the U.S., currently at work on her fifth novel, Maynard describes herself as "having reached the point in my own writing life where one of the greatest sources of fulfillment is helping other writers find their own best voice and tell their story." She would like to add-not for the purpose of showing off, she says, but as a way of providing hope and inspiration to those who may feel discouraged or even totally stuck in their own writing lives-- that the first drafts for each of her four novels, as well as her four- hundred -page memoir, were completed in the space of four solid weeks of writing-a fact only partly attributable to her legendary speed as a typist.