📚 Kickoff Session: 6:00–7:30 PM
📍 Waterloo Public Library
🎟️ Free and open to all writers
Tonight’s featured guest is Grant Tracey, professor, novelist, and editor, leading a session on Writing Compelling Characters.
What makes a character unforgettable? What allows them to step off the page and linger in a reader’s inner life? This evening is an invitation to explore those questions with curiosity, rigor, and generosity.
Whether you’re just beginning or deep in a manuscript, this workshop is about growing your craft in community.
The series continues on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month, 6:00–7:30 PM, at the library.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about why gatherings like this matter so much.
We talk often about artistry. We’re less fond of the quieter word beneath it: craft.
Craft can feel unromantic. Ordinary. Repetitive. But artistry doesn’t arrive instead of craft. It arrives through it. Every piece of work that moves us is supported by a lattice of practiced choices. Familiar moves, learned slowly. Returned to often.
Craft isn’t a constraint on originality. It’s the threshold.
This way of thinking has been beautifully articulated in recent writing by Kathy Fish, a Waterloo native, award-winning author, and one of the clearest voices I know on what craft actually gives us. Her Substack writing on craft is sharp, generous, and grounding, and her craft development workshops are equally thoughtful and practical.
Kathy writes beautifully about this in Craft Books on Writing, where she reminds us that craft isn’t the enemy of originality; it’s the doorway.
What we often call “talent” is simply intimacy with the work, earned over time.
That’s why rooms like this matter. Why workshops matter. Why showing up on an ordinary Wednesday evening with a notebook and an open mind matters.
Bring your curiosity. Bring your questions. Bring the work you’re becoming.
I hope to see you there.
xo—Felicia
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