Special Presentation – Tips and Resources – by Kate Asche
Luncheon — October 2014
Saturday, October 18th, 2014 11:00 AM-1:00 PM
As part of California Writers Week (the third week in October), the Sacramento Branch of the California Writers Club proudly welcomes Constance Hale, renowned journalist and author of Sin and Syntax and Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch.
Members and guests are in for a treat with this esteemed visitor to Sacramento! Constance Hale will shower members and guests with words and wisdom on “How to Tell Your Story and Rivet an Audience,” an abbreviated version of bi-coastal trainings she has given in recent years.
Reared on the North Shore of O’ahu, Constance Hale spoke English at home and Hawaiian creole (“Pidgin English”) at school and with friends. She left her bilingual upbringing to pursue a B.A. in English Literature from Princeton and an M.A. in Journalism from UC Berkeley.
After graduation, Hale wrote fiction and drama, performing her own solo pieces in the San Francisco Bay Area. She worked as a reporter and editor at Gilroy Dispatch, Oakland Tribune, and San Francisco Examiner before becoming copy chief at Wired. Before long she gave birth to Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, followed by Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose. More recently she authored Vex, Hex, Smash & Smooch.
Hale’s work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Adventure, Smithsonian, Writer’s Digest, The Writer, Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, Via, and Afar. She penned a NewYorkTimes.com series on writing.
Dubbed “Marion the Librarian on a Harley or E.B. White on acid,” Hale teaches narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. In addition to teaching at Harvard U and UC Berkeley Extensions, she speaks all over the country. She also works as a freelance editor for Harvard Business School Press. She founded The Prose Doctors, an editors’ collective, and belongs to The Itinerants, a Bay Area writers group.
Preceding Hale at the podium will be “Writer-in-the Know Extraordinaire” Kate Asche, poet, fiction writer, teacher and literary community leader. Asche will lay out resources and angles on writing in honor of California Writers Week, third week in October.
- Monthly Luncheons are open to the public
- Cost is $14 for members, $16 for nonmembers
- The meeting fee includes lunch and beverage
- Cattlemen’s Restaurant, 12409 Folsom Blvd., Rancho Cordova, CA
The restaurant is located just east of Hazel Ave. at the northeast end of the Nimbus Winery complex along Highway 50. Cattlemen’s offers CWC a spacious meeting room with free WiFi, quality AV equipment, free off street parking and excellent food.