Cottonwood News – Kris Neri, award winning author and former owner of The Well Red Coyote bookstore in Sedona, returns to the Verde Valley to present a free workshop for writers, aspiring writers, and readers on Thursday, May 19 at 4:00 pm, at Studio B (Old Town Center for the Arts) in Cottonwood.
Neri will share the techniques necessary to capture a vivid sense of place, for fiction, nonfiction and memoir writers. She will discuss how including a strong sense of place enriches your writing. In addition, Neri will explain the way to transform a static background into an active part of your narration, as well as how to inject setting with perspective, mood, tone, and emotional color.
The concept of setting is also important to readers. Well-crafted settings allow the reader to get fully immersed in a book, using the author’s descriptions to enhance the reading experience. Neri will use her most recent book, Hopscotch Life, to illustrate how she integrates a sense of place with the story she tells. Hopscotch Life, an accept-yourself-in-all-your-glory story, is set in the fictional town of Applewood in northern Arizona and even includes an independent bookstore as the focal point for part of the novel.
Neri is a multi-award honored author. In addition to Hopscotch Life, a recent New Mexico-Arizona Book Award winner, she also writes the humorous Tracy Eaton mysteries, featuring the daughter of eccentric Hollywood stars, and the Samantha Brennan & Annabelle Haggerty magical series, which features a questionable psychic who teams up with a modern goddess-FBI agent. Books will be available for purchase and signing after the workshop.
Neri teaches writing for the prestigious Writers’ Program of the UCLA Extension School, and other organizations. She and her husband Joe owned and operated The Well Red Coyote bookstore in Sedona for ten years, and they now reside in Silver City, New Mexico with a couple of fur babies.
Studio B is part of the Old Town Center for the Arts complex located at Fifth Street and Main in Cottonwood.