Alice Osborn » Workshops

Finding the Perfect Workshop Venue for You

Alice Osborn — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 21:31:09 +0000

How do you know when you’ve found the perfect workshop venue? It’s usually when your students ask you to teach more workshops in that space! Now depending on what you teach you’re going to have different requirements for your students. Some of you may even use your own home as your workshop space, but you folks aren’t the people I’m talking to today.

Finding the right space for what you’re teaching is vital for your students to return and for your workshops to remain profitable. I’m currently teaching all of my live workshops at the Center for Excellence in Raleigh, NC and it’s been a fabulous partnership. The Center for Excellence offers tiered memberships depending on how many times a month you will use the space—this is a great arrangement, but there are other options out there besides dedicated workshop spaces—you can also teach at community centers or lifelong learning programs that will take a percentage of your participant fees or pay you a flat rate from your workshops. I used to teach at several of these centers, but have now streamlined all of my workshops at the Center for Excellence because it makes sense for my business.

If You Teach Writing Workshops Here’s What a Great Workshop Space Looks Like

The location is good with easy access from major highways and the parking lot is not on a high or low slope. Folks shouldn’t have to pay to park! If it’s possible to meet ADA requirements, the workshop space is on the lower floor or there’s an elevator nearby. At one of my workshops I once had a woman fall down the stairs and although she wasn’t too badly hurt, this incident made me think twice about upper level workshop spaces.
There are plenty of tables and comfortable chairs and the room can comfortably hold 20 people. (I know you want big classes, right?) Save your students’ necks with tables, not clipboards!
Good lighting is very important both inside the space in and in the parking lot for night classes. I love spaces that have large windows and natural light.
There’s a whiteboard, easel and projector available.
The space gives you access to a copier or printer when that extra person walks in.
There’s a kitchen available with a water cooler and coffee maker.
The space is clean, free of vermin and well-maintained.

I’ve been teaching live workshops for six years and can attest to the importance all of these points above. Cost is also something you need to think about and a more expensive workshop space can be worth it if you give a lot of workshops.

Your Turn:

What’s missing off of this list? If you teach workshops, please share some of your words of wisdom with us!

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Writers: How Not to Bomb

Alice Osborn — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 23:10:53 +0000

How Not to Bomb

When you’re nervous before a reading, open mic or a speaking event you’re that way because you don’t want to bomb. You don’t want to be humiliated and asked never to come back. You also don’t want to let your audience down. Maybe you’ve had a less-than-ideal speaking experience and you’re afraid lightning will strike twice. I’d like to share a few tips with you on how not to bomb, or at least how to bomb less! Now, let go of your nervousness and give your best performance to the people who have come to see you! Know Your Audience If you’re an author giving a reading, know your audience! Are they familiar with your work or are they completely new to it? If they are new to it, warm them up by telling them why they’ll love your work and use humor! If you’re the first speaker, you won’t have a lot of material to riff about except complimentary stuff about the venue, the hosts and the warm crowd, but if you’re performing after an open mic segment or after another speaker, talk up the folks who have gone before you and give them a little love. Doing so will endear you to your audience. I had a little issue with a speaking engagement when I realized that my talk was geared towards entrepreneurs and not corporate employees. Oh, boy! I should have asked my speaking coordinator who my audience so I could prepare. But here I was and I spoke to them about how being creative and flexible would make them more effective in their presentations—something from entrepreneur world that they may not deal with on a daily basis. Collect Stories As you go about your life, collect anecdotes that will resonate with your audience and that will help you break the tension. Just be sure that they’re relevant to you and your reading! Prepare Rehearse your talk and material ahead of time—mark your pages if you’re reading from your book so you’re not thumbing randomly! Check to see where you’re stumbling and adjust. Time your talk so you’re going over or under. Show Up Early When you show up early rather than on time you give yourself the chance to arrange the room and get a feel for the acoustics. I’ve shown up early at gigs and have rearranged the chairs to go from a classroom to a U-pattern—it’s made all of the difference! Don’t drink too much This applies more at a reading or an open mic, but don’t drink even if you think it’ll help you when it’s your turn at the mic. Drink plenty of water and when you’re all through, then have your favorite adult beverage. Your Turn OK, so those are my tips on how not to bomb. What have I missed? Please feel free to add a few more suggestions in the comments for us!

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Five Easy Ways to Video Blog

Alice Osborn — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 04:17:37 +0000

Using video on your blog can instantly help you build trust, credibility and your expert standing. Video can also give your potential clients a keen sense of what you do and how you do it. For instance, if you’re blogging about “5 Ways to Boost Traffic On Your Website,” wouldn’t your message be more powerful if you could add video to that post along with your image, voice and passion? These days it’s even easier and less expensive to add video with the Flip cameras, iPhones, digital cameras and more! And once you’ve created your video it’s a snap to upload it to YouTube or Vimeo–both video sharing sites can let your video go viral thanks to social media. I also found a new site called Animoto which allows you to create a video/slideshow post accompanied by music using your photos. Now that’s easy! Check out this video I just made using Animoto that shows highlights from my book launch of Unfinished Projects. Here are Five Easy Ways to Video Blog:

know your content so you can talk comfortably in front of the camera without a script; be sure you know what you want your viewers to do after watching your video. It can be “Call Me for a Free Consult” or “Check out my eReport” or “Come Visit My Website for Other Cool Videos.”
Use good indoor lighting, or better yet go outdoors! I love filming on vacation (see my videos taken in South Dakota and New York)
Make sure your sound is clear–clear audio is vital for a good video blog post
Share your videos on Facebook and encourage your friends to “Share” it by asking them do it directly
Don’t try to cram too much into a video post; keep it around three minutes long on a single topic (multi topics in the same video will confuse your viewer and they won’t know what action to take). List posts work really well for this format. For instance, you can create a video about “Three Ways to ….” or create a video for a product or book review.

If you want to know more about video blogging, I suggest you check out this workshop facilitated by Alex Ferguson of EpicRealm Studio and Alice Osborn of Write from the Inside Out: Video Blogging Boot Camp with Alex Ferguson and Alice Osborn Location: EpicRealm Video Studio, 901-D Kildaire Farm Rd. Cary, NC 27511 Thursday, March 31^st from 11:30-1:30pm Cost: $37 Register HERE Everyone knows blogs help you cultivate a following on the web, but did you know that video blogging can help you establish even more trust and impact with your followers—plus, it’s just darn fun! Join web video specialist Alex Ferguson and writer Alice Osborn as they discuss creating strong vLogging (video blogging) content, including how to work on your script. This will be a hands-on workshop which will most benefit those who have some video and blogging experience. Get your video questions answered and start having fun with sharing your expertise to the world! Your Turn:Do you video blog? If yes, have you found that it’s boosted your traffic and your business? Let me know in the comments below:

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How a Correspondence Course Can Fast Track You to Publication

Alice Osborn — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 14:38:10 +0000

In 2011 do you want to be published? Do you want to learn how to be a better writer? Do you want to receive individualized teaching? Do you need an accountability partner to keep you on the creative track? Then consider taking a correspondence course! With a correspondence course, which is a form of distance learning, you learn your lessons via email and/or snail mail. Correspondence courses are in fact older than our country. The first one started as a shorthand course originating from Boston in 1728. I got my feet wet in the writing world I’m now a part of by taking two UNC-Chapel Hill Friday Center correspondence courses nine years ago. Today, I want to give back to writers by offering my own set of correspondence courses in poetry and memoir that provide individualized feedback, coaching and encouragement. [Note: my poetry correspondence class is open to new students this month and my memoir correspondence class starts up again this October.] After my son was born in 2002 I took a Beginning and then an Intermediate Fiction Writing Course through the Friday Center at UNC-Chapel Hill. My goal was to attend graduate school at NC State in English, but I had a problem. My undergrad was in Finance and although I loved to read and write, I didn’t possess the necessary experience or coursework needed. In the Friday Center courses students were required to purchase the Norton Anthology of Short Stories along with a course manual. I did the lessons from the course manual and then mailed them in to my instructor. After about two weeks, she mailed them back to me with feedback. Since this class happened way before the iPhone, all of the class interaction occurred via snail mail. I got A’s in both correspondence classes and was able to attach the transcripts to my graduate school application. Through this UNC Friday Class I gained valuable knowledge in writing fiction and a few years later I signed up to take a poetry correspondence class, hoping for the same results. In fact, a poetry book later and after having won several poetry contests I owe much of my good publishing fortune to my poetry correspondence class teacher I met while taking her poetry class at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. I knew correspondence classes work and last year when I held my first class I wanted to reach students who live out-of-state or who can’t attend my in-class workshops due to family and work schedules. Correspondence classes also give offer a personalized touch you may not receive in an online class. After a successful first year, I’m now looking forward to forming a new group of correspondence class poets this month.

From Barry, a 2010 Poetry Correspondence Class student from Ferrisburg, VT: “Taking Alice’s correspondence course has helped me dig deeper, work harder, revise more and like what I write more. I know that I wouldn’t have written any of the poems that came from the monthly challenge of her prompts. Alice’s input has helped me see my poetry in a different light, expanded the subject matter for poems beyond emotion and encouraged me to do research just to write a couple of lines.” From Patty in Bonlee, NC: “Alice Osborn’s correspondence course in poetry is spot on. Her monthly prompts are imaginative, well thought out, and cover a different form of poetry every month. I’ve truly grown as a writer and a poet by participating in Alice’s classes and workshops.”

I issue you a prompt via email, then you send me your poem via email and then I print it out, handwrite my feedback and then snail mail it back to you. Postage is included in your class fee. A Few Spaces Still Open! If you want to be a better poet, consider enrolling my 2011 Poetry Correspondence Class, which starts this week. It is $295 for the entire year (which is less than $24 a month!). There are a few spots still available. By keeping up with your monthly prompts and improving on your feedback, you’re only a few months away from possible publication. Click HERE to begin your journey today! Your Turn I’d like to know if you ever took a correspondence course and what you got out of it!

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Why I Teach Memoir

Alice Osborn — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 03:40:47 +0000

I teach memoir because I want to help others remember the past. I want others to preserve their memories so no one’s left wondering what happened? Writing down the past provides a link, like a rope between the past and the future. Some people want to capture their stories to give something real and tangible to their grandchildren; others want to feel that their life meant and means something. Writing your memoirs can also teach you to stop cycles of abuse and give logic to highly charged emotions. Writing down your memoirs may not eliminate family secrets but it can create reckoning and growth. Memoir writing helps you control something in the present you weren’t able to control in the past and that is so powerful. I think it’s a shame that we cannot be witness to so many of our grandparents’ lives because they didn’t leave a record for their descendants. For instance, I hardly know anything about my French grandmother, born in 1895, died in 1995. My namesake. I know she could sew and cook and lost three brothers (or was it an uncle in WWI in Northern France?) but I don’t even know what she looked like before the age of 50. She didn’t like to have her pictures taken and my mother told me she burned all of her photos because she didn’t want anyone making fun of the clothes she wore back in the day. At least I had a chance to know her, while my younger brother probably only remembers a very old woman yelling at him in French. They didn’t have much of a relationship as he was 10 the last time he saw her, while I was 14. If she had written a letter to both of us or exclusively to my brother (who was named after her husband, my grandfather), my brother would have felt much more connected to his grandmother and she to him. On the other hand, my father’s father kept meticulous records and I have many of his framed postcards and ship paintings hanging in our house. He was a retired naval captain who served in Bremerhaven after WWII and commanded a ship in the Pacific during WWII. On the backs of the postcards and photos he lists where/when and who. He was a nonfiction writer who wrote for Naval Proceedings and in later years for the Op-Ed section of his local paper in Annapolis, Maryland. Because of Grandpa Osborn I have my childhood photos of me at age 3 and 5 from his mantle. My parents and I are estranged from each other and I don’t have any photos of myself that I didn’t take. So my grandfather’s photos of me are the only ones I have which I acquired after he died in 1998. When you write down your memories you’re also preserving them and you help connect others to your life. If you are interested in learning more about writing your memoirs and are ready to jump in, sign up for my “Sharing Your Story: A Beginning Memoir Experience” at A Place for Women to Gather in North Raleigh starting Tues. January 11th to Tues. February 15th (six weeks) from 11:30-1:30pm. No previous experience is required and all writers at all levels are welcome to join us. And don’t let the name fool you—gentlemen: we welcome you, too! Cost is $60, which is extremely reasonable—only $10 a 90 min class. You can register online HERE Looking forward to having you share your story with us!

Alice

Sharing your Story: A New Beginning Memoir Experience Location: A Place for Women to Gather, 8380 Six Forks Rd, Suite 201, Raleigh, NC 27615 Starting Tues Jan 11th through Tues Feb 15th Duration: 6 weeks Suggested Donation: $60 Time: 11:30-1:30, participants bring their own lunch. Drinks and dessert provided. To Register, click HERE or email Alice or call Alice at 919-971-9414

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Alice’s Upcoming Workshops

Alice Osborn — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:00:21 +0000

I look forward to seeing you in many of my 2010 workshops this year! I’ve tried to have offerings for everyone, whether you’re a memoirist, budding creative writer, entreprenur who’s ready to blog or a seasoned poet. I’m offering workshops in the daytime, on weekday evenings and on a few Saturdays. And for the first time, I’m offering a poetry correspondence course. So, peruse these offerings and tell your friends. 2010 is your year to make your writing a priority! Blogging for Business with Alice Osborn and Eileen Batson Location: Calm and Sense in Glenwood Village Center 2603 Glenwood Avenue, Raleigh, NC 27608 Date: Wed. January 13th Time: 7-9:30pm Cost: $30, call: 919.787.1799 to register. Major credit cards accepted. In this course, students will learn about what a blog is, how to write one and how it can be used for a small business and tips and tricks for getting your blog read and remembered. Small business experts, writers and marketers, Eileen Batson and Alice Osborn will help you construct your blog, give you pointers on making it shine and will help bring visitors to your blog, which will help you grow your business.

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NEW Correspondence Course for Poets! Look for more details coming out on this exciting opportunity to have Alice mentor your poems and get YOU published in 2010. $295 for 12 months of hand-written poetry critique (1 poem per month). Add $95 to $295 for 3 personalized phone coaching sessions Register today: Course starts Feb. 15. Class limted to 6 poets.

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Sharing Your Story, a Memoir Experience with Alice Osborn Location: A Place for Women to Gather 8380 Six Forks Rd, Suite 201, Raleigh, NC 27615 Dates: Mondays from Mon. Feb 1st – Mon. March 8th Duration: 6 weeks Suggested Donation: $60 Time: 11:30-1:30, participants bring their own lunch. Drinks and dessert provided Register by calling 919-846-3601 or register online here. We all have a life story inside of us, but we may feel that what we’ve experienced is not relevant or important. In this workshop taught by experienced workshop leader and teacher, Alice Osborn, you’ll learn how you can harness the power of your stories for future generations and that what you’ve learned over a lifetime is a treasure that must be shared. In-class writing exercises that invoke food memories and the six senses will play a strong role in this lunchtime workshop series. Feedback from Alice Osborn will help you generate memorable prose and you’ll also learn techniques to keep up your writing practice after the class concludes. We welcome all levels and all experiences.

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Business Writing Classes at Team Nimbus, 3801 Computer Dr., Suite 101 Raleigh, NC Dates: 4 Classes on Various Fridays: 2/19, 3/12, 4/9 and 4/23 Time: 9:30am-11:30am Cost: $49 per class (Team Nimbus members, $37) or buy the package at $147.

Classes will include tips and tricks on e-mail marketing and newsletters, presenting yourself in writing, etiquette, social media communication, profiles and bios and much, much more! Register at alice@aliceosborn.com.

Sharing Your Life Story, a Memoir Class with Alice Osborn Seniors Only, 55+ Location: Apex Community Center 53 Hunter St. Apex, NC 27502 Dates: Wednesdays from Wed. Feb 17th – Wed. March 24th Duration: 6 weeks Cost: $13 (Apex Resident), $18 (Apex Non-resident) Time: 2-4pm To Register, call 249-3402. Checks made payable to “Town of Apex” Click here to download the Spring 2010 Apex Program Guide and Registration Forms

We all have a life story inside of us, but many times we feel that what we’ve experienced is not relevant or important. Learn how to harness the power of your stories for future generations. Writing exercises and instructor feedback will help generate memorable prose. All levels are welcome. Alice Osborn instructs. Limited to 20 participants.

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Get serious about your writing in 2010 Writing Boot Camp with Alice Osborn and Dave Baldwin

Location: Sat. March 27^th at the Holiday Inn Brownstone Hotel , Hillsborough St.

Time: 8:30 am – 4:30 pm. Arrive early at 8am for networking and continental breakfast

Cost: $250

Includes: full continental breakfast & gourmet pasta lunch

Do your words resonate with your readers? Learn how to make the most of every word so your message gets through quickly to your audience. This class will equip you with the tools you need to begin building mastery of the written word. Take charge of your writing in 2010 and learn from writers, authors and editors, Dave Baldwin and Alice Osborn to whip your writing into shape! We’ll cover style, grammar and clarity in communication. If you are ready to master your command of the English language and succeed in business, register today for the Writers’ Boot Camp. RSVP today by emailing Alice

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Presenting Your Words Without Fear with Alice Osborn Location: Meredith College, Raleigh, NC Dates: Wed. April 14, Wed. April 21, Wed. April 28 Time: 7-9pm Cost: $60, Register here or call 919-760-8450 Public speaking can build your self-esteem, open new professional doors, and it can help you conquer many of your fears and anxieties. Experienced speaker and presenter, Alice Osborn,will help you prepare to speak in public so that you can become the go-to expert in your field and chart your own speaking endeavors. You will also learn how to fit your talk to your audience and how to develop short and longer talks. This class is ideal for those who want to conduct more public speaking for groups or for their work. Participants will learn how to organize a talk as well as their introduction and will have their presentation videotaped and critiqued.

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Marketing and Publicity for Writers, with Alice Osborn Class ID# 12894 Location: Duke Evening and Weekend Courses: The Bishop’s House, Room 107 Date: Sat. May 15th Time: 9:30am-12:30pm Cost: $85 Regular, $75 if enroll by 5/1 and $68 for Duke Employees Materials Fee: $3 Register here.

This workshop is for both published and yet-to-be published writers who need help crafting a marketing strategy for getting the word out about their books via social media networking, websites, blogs, and other tools. If no one knows who you are, how will they buy your book? She will give tips and tricks from her own experience as a successful published writer/editor and will provide generous take-home resources.

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Intermediate Creative Writing: Focus on the Memoir Location: Sertoma Arts Center, Millbrook Rd, Raleigh, NC Dates: Wednesdays from July 14- Aug. 4 Time: 7-9pm Cost: $56 Online Registration here or call to register at (919) 420-2329

We all have a life story inside of us, but we may feel that what we’ve experienced is not relevant or important. In this workshop, you’ll learn how you can harness the power of your stories for future generations and that what you’ve learned over a lifetime is a treasure that must be shared. In-class writing exercises and feedback from the instructor will help you generate memorable prose and you’ll also learn techniques to keep up your writing practice after the class concludes. This is class is designed for students who have previous writing experience or who have been working on their memoirs. Computer access is recommended.

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