Personal Touch

Welcome to the Neighborhood News

In today's Personal Touch interview Rebecca Cressman chats with Jo and Lois.

Jo Schaffer and Lois Brown are leading their first-ever boot camp for aspiring teen writers. The one-day event on April 23rd at Utah Valley University will help teens ages 13-18 learn the elements of story-telling from best-selling authors who will entertain and explain concepts like character development, plotting, and dialogue. The idea to encourage young authors bubbled out of the two women’s writers group called “Writers Cubed.” There they and other writers collaborate, practice, encourage, and support each other throughout their writing process, and they wanted to do the same for teens who dreamed of writing too.

Jo Schaffer, was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, to a literary, intellectual mother and an artist, naturalist father. Her parents instilled in her a love of art, books, nature, people and philosophy. Jo wrote her first book when she was six and has written ever since. Jo schooled in London, studying the arts and British literature and then in Utah, first focusing on archaeology and the humanities, and finally settling on English with a writing emphasis. She married and had three sons with her childhood friend who is an artist and filmmaker, living in LA, Oregon, the Bay Area and now Utah.

Lois Brown received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Brigham Young University in 1991 and worked as a news correspondent for the Deseret News in Washington, D.C. She later returned to school and completed a Master’s degree in communications research which led her to working in the technology industry as a marketer/writer. After giving birth to her first child, she changed career courses again and started her own freelance writing business. Since 1994, Lois has written nearly fifty articles and books, including working as the chief editor to a former New York Times best-selling author Dr. Neil Solomon and co-writing a book on time management with former Miss America Sharlene Wells Hawkes. In 2007, she published a book about stress management with psychologist Victoria Anderson. Recently she has turned her interests to writing fiction after realizing the bedtime stories she tells her four children never put them to sleep. 

Web

http://www.writerscubed.com/events_TeenBootCamp.asp

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We want to thank Rebecca Cressman and her staff for their dedication and commitment to bringing us the Personal Touch interview every week.  We are sad to see them leave our family. They will be missed.

yourLDSneighborhood Staff

As always, we welcome your comments.

To view a copy of the Neighborhood News for Monday, 4 April, please click here.