"Go Places With Your Art" Workshop for Artists and Creatives

Are you ready to share your creative voice with the world? The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow (WCDH) is proud to present a workshop for artists and creatives who are ready to bring their work to the public and want to maximize their reach. “So, You Want to Go Places with Your Art,” will be instructed by writer, storyteller, educator, and musician Ken Waldman. All proceeds from this workshop will benefit the WCDH scholarship fund. The fund supports emerging writers and marginalized voices by providing financial support so that they may benefit from a writing residency. Scholarships are awarded on an as-needed basis depending on availability.

“So, You Want to Go Places with Your Art” will be held at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, 515 Spring Street in Eureka Springs. Class will run from 9:00 am to 12:00 noon Central Daylight Time on Saturday, May 15. The cost of the workshop is $35. This is sure to be a lively, engaging, and inspiring class and is especially recommended for writers who want to be published for the first time, or published more often, or published in larger, more competitive venues. Also, for musicians who want to perform, or record, for the first time, or who want to go from local venues to, say, Fayetteville, Little Rock, Memphis, and beyond. How do you get people with blogs, or radio DJs, to pay attention to your music? It's the same for performers in other disciplines, whether theater or dance. It’s also the same for visual artists. How can you expand your reach, so more people are aware of your work?

No matter their discipline or experience, attendees will leave with concrete ideas regarding what they might put into practice to take their art further. Participants will leave with handouts for future reference.

The workshop will begin with introductions, so Waldman knows what types of creatives are participating. There will be several, short writing exercises to further determine where we are now with our work, and where we want to be. This will be an interactive workshop, and Waldman share useful resources. Though this is a one-session workshop, Waldman will invite participants to stay in touch with him and encourage participants to stay in touch with each other. In his many years of leading workshops, he's found we're all equals in art-making—we're all striving to make something new and good and can always learn from each other.

Ken Waldman was 30 years old when he moved to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1985 to attend the MFA program there as a fiction writer. He'd never written a poem—never had any work published, though he had written several short stories. He had only started playing fiddle, badly, five years earlier, and was still, technically, a beginner. Ten years later, after graduating his program, followed by three years working as a tenure-track assistant professor, playing lots of fiddle, and then enduring a long illness time and protracted convalescence, he became “Alaska's Fiddling Poet.” For the past 25 years, and counting, he's made a living as a free-lance writer, musician, performer, and touring artist. He began free-lancing in 1995, when living in Juneau, Alaska, where every event out of town meant either getting on a boat or a plane. In 1998 he moved to Anchorage, Alaska's commercial hub, and in 2001 he drove out of state to pursue more opportunities. Waldman’s past appearances include the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, the Dodge Poetry Festival, The International Festival of Arts & Ideas, and the Woodford Folk Festival in Queensland, Australia, and hundreds of other events in a vast range of venues. He's been a visiting writer at nearly 100 colleges and universities, a visiting artist at over 240 schools in 35 states and has led workshops from Alaska to Maine. His essay, “How I Make a Living in Poetry” was published in the September/October 2015 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (and can be seen here: https://www.pw.org/content/the_poets_job_how_i_make_a_living_in_poetry).

Since 2000, Ken Waldman has also had fifteen full-length poetry collections published (his sixteenth will be out in September 2021), a memoir about his life as a touring artist, a creative writing manual, and a children’s book. His nine CDs include two for children, and over a hundred of his own compositions. More than 400 of his poems and stories have been in literary journals of all kinds. To learn more about Waldman, visit https://www.kenwaldman.com.