This is a  session to open the door to the full potential of your writing life.

What to expect from me:

• I am a working writer who also works with writers.
• My coaching relationships are based upon honest connection, give and take and respect.
• I work in the present to change the future. That means I devote my efforts to helping you identify unproductive habits. How they got there is not our concern. How to push them aside is.

What to expect in our consultation

During this 20 minute free session, we will work together to:

• Examine and analyze your existing writing life in relation to your goals.
• Identify the key areas where you can make immediate adjustments.
• Inspire a sense of purpose and control in relation to your writing and its place in your life.

What to expect from coaching

• Your needs are unique and yet all writers share common ground:
  • We will talk about your practice, your goals, and your writing life in relation to those practices and gols.
• Based on your unique process, I will act as a guide and strategist, working with you to design the structure that best supports your success and diminishes blocks.
• The expertise I have to share with you has been honed over the course of more than 20 years of teaching writers, including award-winning nonfiction and best-selling authors.
• With that knowledge, I will help you develop the skill-set that allows you to tell your best stories.

Have more questions?

• Just contact us and ask.

Ready to take the first step to managing your writing life?

• Contact us to set up a complimentary consultation (on Skype or on the phone).
• Seriously, what have you got to lose?

Fill out the form below or get crazy and just call:

(541) 362-3017

1) The college admissions process is extremely selective. Talented and dedicated students from around the world are competing for a scarce number of spots. Your spot.

2) Admissions officers, facing the challenge of selecting the best students for their universities, rely heavily on admissions essays to provide insight into the applicants’ qualities. Your qualities.

Fortunately, once grades and activities are in the books, the essay stands as the single aspect of the application process entirely within your control.

But let’s admit it: Sometimes, total control sucks.

No assignment guidelines to fall back on. No specific criteria to get an A. Just the overwhelming pressure to choose a moment in your life that best illustrates who you are and why you should leapfrog over the competition.

And if that isn’t enough, because the best essays are as unique as the individuals who write them, you need to decide the most effective narrative style to showcase that moment. It’s enough to overwhelm even the best writers.

Luckily, you don’t have to do it alone.

At Stir, we offer several levels of assistance — from brainstorming to final draft– to assure you submit a truly outstanding admissions essay, highlighting your qualities and individual voice.

Whether you need assistance with a college admission essay or graduate school personal statement, working with a Stir coach will ensure that you clearly communicate the unique contributions you will bring to your academic community.

Take a moment to explore our Application Essay Programs, choose which one is right for you and register today.

And from those stories and experiences, we all have within us our own individual and unique life story to tell.

The key is finding it.

This workshop is designed for people who are compelled by family stories, journals and memoir and who are working to record their own significant experiences of transformation, adventure, loss and survival.

Using creative writing exercises, we will retrieve and record the important people, places and events in our lives; we will discover our stories.

In telling our own stories, we not only come to better understand the meaning they have for us, but how they speak to larger truths of the human experience.

The workshop includes guidance and exercises to:

• trigger and gather memories;
• organize, sort and structure a story;
• incorporate the gathered, sorted material into a written draft.

Next Workshop begins Nov 20, 2012  6 PM

Workshop includes:

• 20-minute pre-workshop, personal consultation with instructor
• 4 class sessions/ 2 hours per class
• Follow up, one hour personal editing session with instructor
• Max class size = 5
• Cost: $175.00

Maybe you didn’t write enough. Maybe you didn’t read enough. Maybe you didn’t submit enough for consideration.

But worse than not doing “enough,” you have likely beaten yourself up for it.

This strategy workshop, designed for writers in all genres and levels of expertise, will help you (kindly) plan your next year of writing.

Using a series of exercises and group exchanges, you will identify goals that are important to you; uncover the barriers to your productivity; and create a specific, 12-month writing plan with deadlines and a system of accountability for meeting those deadlines.

You’ll even get get a head start on the project you had intended to be working on right now.

At the end of the workshop you will have a schedule draft, a writing plan and the enthusiasm to achieve your goals.

Workshop Details:

• One class 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Follow up, one hour personal coaching session
• Max class size = 5
• Cost: $175.00
• Location: Eugene, Oregon

Interested in taking The No More Excuses Workshop Let us Know HERE.

Are you looking for something to get you writing but you are not sure where you fit in?

No matter what adjective you are currently using to define (and limit?) your writer self (new, overworked, successful, frustrated, talented, misunderstood), if you want to be as excited about writing as you did that first time you just KNEW you had a story to tell, you have found your place.

Buzz is for writers who want to write and aren’t. Period.

This exercise-intensive workshop will help you rediscover YOUR creative inspiration— each day, each class — so you can tap into that writing BUZZ and do the kind of writing you wish you were doing right now.

Workshop Details:

• 4 classes/ 2 hours per class (option to extend)
• Max class size = 5
• Cost: $175.00
• Location: Eugene, Oregon

Interested in Building Buzz around your writing? Let us Know HERE.

In this workshop, we will work on perhaps the most critical and challenging element of the personal essay: making the individual experience global, or at least bigger than ourselves. And we will do it not with overwrought emotional prose, but by relating inherently dramatic events that capture the writer’s struggles to handle them.

Want an example?

Cancer survivor Andrea Coller’s award-winning personal essay, “I Want My Life Back,” offers the perfect blend of riveting detail and spare emotion:

“Am I dead? Did it happen? Did I die?

I can’t move. I can’t see. But I can hear. Clicking. Beeping. Footsteps. Unfamiliar voices. Cryptic loudspeaker announcements. Hospital noises. I try to listen to the voices, but they float in and out in waves. They talk a lot about urine flow. Sometimes they say my name.” [Read the entire essay here]

Next workshop begins December 9, 2012  4 p.m. and runs four consecutive Sunday afternoons. ((Dec. 9. 16. 23, 30)

• 20-minute pre-workshop, personal consultation with instructor
• 4 class sessions/ 2 hours per class
• Follow up, one hour personal editing session with instructor
• Max class size = 5
• Cost: $175.00

Interested in taking The Art of the Personal Essay Workshop register here HERE.

This workshop is for business professionals whose writing must capture and move target audiences. In everything from e-mails to reports to presentations to Web copy, the people who succeed in today’s competitive business environment know that clear writing gives them an edge.

Our Master the Message Workshop helps participants clarify their ideas, reduce their writing time and get better results.

Our approach is hands-on and highly interactive, designed to put each writer in the readers’ shoes.

Working with direct and individual feedback, workshop participants are able to apply what they are learning directly to their own strategic writing – from a press release to a proposal or anything in between.

In addition to learning new techniques, workshop participants learn to easily identify and correct problems with clarity, cohesion and grammar.

Time(s): 4 hours

Cost: $175.00 per person

Location: Eugene, Oregon or remote

Five participants. One day. Hard work.

This workshop is structured to mirror the experience of a graduate-level grant writing seminar. Once registered for the workshop, writers must be ready and willing to submit an in-progress grant application for workshop. (Maximum 5 pages) In addition, the writer will submit a two paragraph statement of purpose for the work including specific feedback desires.

While each participant must be willing and able to offer constructive critique of other participants’ work, the core tenet of this type of workshop is learning by listening.

In addition to the workshop feedback, each writer will receive a thorough, written discussion of his or her work by the workshop instructor.

To date our students have garnered more than $200,000 in grants and scholarships.

Workshop Details:

• One class. 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
• Follow up, written critique from instructor
• Max class size = 5
• Cost: $300.00
• Location: Eugene, Oregon

Interested in taking Show Me the Money? Let us Know HERE.

If you are not a native English speaker and struggling with writing, our editors can help you.

Together we can examine the areas of concern from your adviser or committee members, and with our personalized care, you will learn to bring clarity, cohesion and grammatical integrity to your thesis, dissertation or journal article.

But more than simply solving the problems in a single piece of writing, one-on-one discussions and editing of your work with a personal editor will dramatically improve your overall ability to write in English.

We have decades of experience working with non-native English speakers at the university level. We know the problems; we know the solutions.

Time(s): Four 1-hour private meetings (in person or via skype) with four additional manuscript reviews.

Cost: $300.00

Location: Eugene, Oregon

Interested in conquering English in your writing, Let us Know HERE.

Our original, state-of-the-art professionalization workshops bring these unspoken practices into the open and use readings, role play, and other techniques to train students to get that coveted tenure-track appointment.

The Professionalization Workshop focuses on career-planning and preparation for all aspects of the increasingly perilous job market in a time of university downsizing.

The workshop reveals the hidden micro-processes of the job search process from start to finish, from deciphering job ads, crafting a competitive cover letter, tailoring c.v.s to specific jobs, writing and presenting a successful job talk, taking question and answers, comportment at job search meals and focused interviews, appropriate body language and attire, learning from rejections, and negotiating the contract after the job offer.

Time(s): 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM

Cost: $300.00

Location: Eugene, Oregon

Interested in taking a Job Market Bootcamp, Let us Know HERE.