Inside Look

By Joseph Nichols, Bluegrass Writers Studio

            Every time I go to a professional writer’s question-and-answer session at the local bookstore, the same question is raised: Where do you get your inspiration? The writer always seems annoyed; I’m sure they get asked that so many times they want to vomit. Accordingly, they always give the same, simple answer: Observation and Work.

            Neither of these are satisfying answers, or at least they aren’t for me.

            So, as writers, where can we look to gain our ideas, beyond just keeping our eyes open to the world around us and establishing the habit of sitting down to write daily?

By Jen Parks, Bluegrass Writers Studio

By Kristen Roach Thompson, Associate Coordinator, Bluegrass Writers Studio

     “But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers. Still crazy after all these years.” -Paul Simon

     Maybe this lyric can explain my long-overdue, 40-something studies at Bluegrass Writers Studio. A jury of my peers always sounded like a dream enterprise. But who, exactly, did I picture as my peers, way back in the 1970’s, when Simon crooned this and taught me what nostalgia was? At the ripe old age of five, having seen a meeting of the minds among a certain Skywalker/Solo/Kenobi/Bacca crew, my idea of justice and equality may have been a bit overwrought. Not only would my “peers,” whoever they were, not convict me for my behavior, they’d probably be alongside me, wreaking the havoc we deemed necessary.

By Laura Wooffitt, Bluegrass Writers Studio

This is part two of series on where to eat in Lisbon, our home away from homepage. For part one, click here.