Fruit Cup Free Writing Sprint Thursday Nights with Sandra Shattuck & Mark Pettis!
Join Fruit Cup Writing Sprint with Mark Pettis & Sandra Shattuck for a free virtual hour-long writing session on Thursday Nights! Stay after to chat about writing and writing life.
ABOUT OUR FACILITATORS:
Sandra Shattuck
I recently retired from a 40-year career in higher education teaching writing and literature, and published my first novel in 2023: The Electric Life of Lilah Browne, a middle-grade novel about a girls' computer science club. I have published academic essays and book reviews, creative nonfiction, and poetry, and have written with various writing groups over the last thirty years.
Mark Pettis
I have had a 40-year professional career as a carpenter, general contractor, and project manager. I discovered a passion for creative writing in the last decade. I started writing as a way to record the stories I was formulating in my mind, and I have not stopped since. One of these stories is now being worked on with an editor towards publication. The Fifth Brain Collective and Fruit Cup enable me to continue pursuing my creative writing in a safe and welcoming environment.
Here’s what you can expect:
Show up with or without any writing or writing ideas. We start at 5pm MT on Thursdays (find your time zone here) and write on our own for an hour—video on or off, mics off. After an hour, we re-convene and talk about our writing. No one has to talk or respond, but those who attend Fruit Cup have said that the feedback is always insightful, caring, and helpful. You also do not have to stay for the writing talk. We usually talk for an hour, and sometimes, writers stay even longer.
You will receive a weekly reminder for Fruit Cup with the Zoom link and a reminder of the FBC Values we practice. You can see those values below. By attending a Fruit Cup writing session, you indicate that you agree to these values.
The Fruit Cup host ensures that any technical glitches are addressed and facilitates our collaborative writing discussion. Our hosts ensure that we are not offering unauthorized therapy, nor do we discuss current affairs. (If something comes up in the writing, we’ll talk about the craft involved.) Our goal is to ensure that Fruit Cup remains a welcoming and sacred place to practice writing and conversations about writing.
The Fifth Brain Collective practices the following values:
Honor everyone’s fifth brain, individuality of thought and imagination, and remind each other to trust our own thoughts, our intuitive light, our own personal patterns of work and ideas.
Listen with empathy, attention, and respect.
Offer generous, constructive feedback that takes intentions and the difficulties of creative work into consideration.
Respect the confidentiality of each writer’s ideas and texts.
Offer advice without ego or expectation. Everyone is free to choose or reject advice!
Consider taking chances and exploring different paths that are revealed in our alchemical discussions.
Encourage each other to be persistent and determined in each person’s right to be creative.
Share new learnings and new questions freely.
Celebrate our diversity of identities, voices, genres, levels of experience.
Remind each other to experiment, play, and enjoy the work.
Sign up now using the form below! If you have trouble accessing this form, click here
