I have always considered Writers Forum one of the best things about Petaluma. Jane Merryman
Research is essential and fun. The challenge for most writers is learning how to stay on track with writing goals when investigation detours take up too much of our time. Frances will share her tips and tools for managing research, scene setting and how to avoid over zealous forays into the maze of online procrastination.
Frances Rivetti is a British/American freelance journalist and author of the non-fiction Fog Valley Book Series — Fog Valley Crush, Love at First Bite and Fog Valley Winter, Pioneer Heritage, Backroad Rambles and Vintage Recipes. She began her career as a newspaper reporter in Cambridgeshire, England and after settling in California in the 1990s, began writing for lifestyle publications in the U.S, UK and Australia. Fog Valley Winter is the 2018 recipient of the Silver Award for best holiday book in the annual Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYS). Frances writes a monthly Behind The Frame column for Petaluma Arts Center and posts on local arts and culture on her popular blog site Southern Sonoma Country Life. She is currently working on completing her first work of fiction, a contemporary adult fiction novel set in Northern California’s coastal realm and inland behind the Redwood Curtain. Frances and her husband raised three sons in West Petaluma and she remains actively involved in the community.
“What three things can never be done?
Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead
When we tell the truth about our lives, the doors fall off their hinges. Walls come tumbling down. When done with the skillful precision of an architect, the intuitive wisdom of a shaman, and the passion of one who loves a good story, the formerly dark chambers of our lives are illuminated.
Christine will show how to shape your experiences into stories that will not only heal you, as the storyteller, but free those who are brave enough not to look away.
Christine Falcon-Daigle has worked in film and radio, serving as associate producer for The Last Stand, an award-winning documentary that aired nationally on public television, and screened at more than two-dozen major film festivals worldwide. She edited live interviews with authors for KRCB’s Word by Word, hosted by Jordan Rosenfeld. She was a regular contributor to Tiny Lights – a publication devoted to the art of personal essay.
For more than two decades, she has attended writing retreats and conferences, and participated in a number of on-going writing workshops and groups in Marin and Sonoma Counties.
She has read her work at literary events including San Francisco’s Litquake, The Sonoma County Book Festival in Santa Rosa, BustOut Stories at the Downtown Art Center in San Rafael, Book Passage, Aqus Café’s Speakeasy Literary Saloon, LiveWire Literary Salon and more. She earned her MFA at the California Institute of Integral Studies in SF, where she also contributed to and moderated a panel discussion for the school’s inter-arts journal, Mission at Tenth. In 2007, her novel This Is What I Know was named as a finalist in the William Faulkner Wisdom Creative Writing Competition sponsored by The Pirates’ Alley Society in New Orleans. In 2011 and again in 2017, Petaluma Readers’ Theater selected her work for live performance.
She currently lives on an organic farm in Petaluma with her farmer husband and teenaged daughter.
