Fine Lines Summer Camp 2012

This is our thirteenth year sponsoring Fine Lines creative writing summer camps for students of all ages. Join writers who add clarity and passion to their lives with the written word.

We will have fun with sentences, learn to play while developing poems-stories-essays, and discover creative corners of our minds that we did not know existed. Metaphorically, we will take our journal under a “shade tree” and talk together about issues that matter. We will swim around important “buoys” in our educational journeys. We will row a boat to a “lighthouse” that shows us our path through the fog. We will take our minds for a “jog” to the library. We will learn to write more, write faster, and write better. More than anything, though, we will create time to dream about our ideas and celebrate the power and beauty of words.

Where: Beveridge Magnet Middle School

1616 South 120 st, Omaha

When: June 11-15, 8:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Contact the school office if you have questions (402) 557-4000.
Use PayPal (button below) or make checks out to Fine Lines ($150/person). The registration fee includes a notebook, a camp t-shirt, frequent snacks, daily guest speakers, editing help for your writing, and a yearly subscription to the Fine Lines Journal.

Click Here to Download the Flier: 2012CampApp

Click the button below to make a paypal payment! Or download the attached form, fill it out and send it in! Hope to see you there!

I’m looking at my bookshelf right now and I still have the orange journal you handed me the summer before I went to Westside Middle School.  That was back in 2002.  Now, I am completing a BA in creative writing from UNL, assembling a creative thesis, and applying to graduate schools.  Looking back, I think your camp was the first time someone told me that I could be a writer.  It wasn’t a place where teachers told me I couldn’t or that someone was better than me at something.  We just wrote, and that was just the best feeling.  Something as simple as a summer camp helped me feel like I could become the writer I am now, and even the writer I want to become later.

I am currently the editor of a regional magazine run through the Center for Great Plains Studies at UNL called  “Plains Song Review.”  I served on the review board two years prior, and I’ve been having a great time organizing the work of other writers and giving people a chance to be published.  One of my missions since going to UNL has been to give back to writers any way I can.  I also work at the UNL writing center and am one of the senior staff members there.  Every day I work with writers one-on-one.  I really can’t imagine any more fulfilling work I could be doing for other students while I’m at UNL.

If you need any help this summer with Fine Lines, please don’t hesitate to contact me.  I’d love to hear from you and talk writing.

Thanks again for my first writing journal and everything that followed.

-Neal Gebhard

David Prinz Hufford

I was sleepless one night in Omaha, but that was weeks ago. I also spent a week one night in Omaha, but I lived there many years. Unless you are a writer, you may not understand these time shifts.

Often it happens, but not often enough; the tireless incubus which drives the poet comes out, many times at night, and will not let him sleep. Some do not believe in inspiration; perhaps, they have never been inspired. But I have, and sometimes, it is a longing anguish, not just to say what needs to be said, but to say what cannot be said.

I have had the opportunity at writers’ conferences, workshops, and retreats to observe others with this malady: the creature which comes out at night and will not let you sleep. I understand that de Maupassant had it, to the point of insomnia. This creature wants out and can have life only in inspiration or invention. Normal people may have it, but they go back to sleep. The inventor of the vacuum sweeper had it, so he got out of bed and drew the first design of what is now your modern convenience.

It is winter, and the creature in me needs the warmth of human association, from the waking souls who will not sleep, but who arise from a warm bed to let the emotional dog out, to what Camus called the “invincible summer,” and the excited creature acts like hope, acts like perpetual morning, and acts like love.

The Nebraska Writing Project is sponsoring two youth writing festivals this year. The first is on Saturday, March 3rd at Elkhorn High School from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The second is at the University of Nebraska at Kearney on April 28th from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Both festivals are open to any student or teacher grades 9-12.

Cost per student is $15 early registration: $20 late registration.  Registration includes a t-shirt, notebook, and pencil  (subject to availability with late registrations).

To register or for more information, including scheduling updates, go to the Youth Festival Homepage.

Youth Writing Festival Brochure

The UNO flag will be lowered to half-staff today, Jan. 18, in honor of UNO faculty member Evangelina “Gigi” Brignoni. She taught in the Education Dept. and passed away Jan. 14 at age 57.

Gigi was a Fine Lines Special Editor for two years and helped run the Oxbow Writing Project in the summer on the UNO campus. We will miss her.

David

A memorial service for Gigi is scheduled for Wednesday evening at 6:00 p.m. at Heafey-Heafey-Hoffman Dworak & Cutler Mortuary on 7805 West Center Road. Visitation will be from 3:00-6:00 p.m. The family has suggested memorials to the American Cancer Society.

Please feel free to leave comments here. Share a memory or your well wishes for her family and friends.

Evangelina "Gigi" Brignoni

by Kirk Zebolsky, Omaha Literature Examiner

December 24, 2011

“Most people die,” said an Omaha woman, a first-time author, referring to her ruptured aneurysm and her chances of survival.

A “very low percentage” of people with such a rupture survive, she said in an interview.

“The majority of people who suffer a ruptured brain aneurysm don’t make it to the hospital … my recovery was really a miracle.”

She is Kim Justus, who published her book “In a Flash” in December and has been publicizing the book. It is praised by a best-selling author and by a retired Omaha World-Herald senior editor.

Justus worked for 25 years in financial services, a field that matched her college degree. But now she is a self-published author who credits the Fine Lines Writers Group and several people in particular whose editing helped her achieve a final draft.

In an email of Dec. 14, she said she “Just got the books …  It’s been available on Amazon as paperback, also Kindle, Nook & soon in iTunes. My first book signing is Saturday … It’s all so new…happened quicker than I thought.”

“In a Flash: Miracles Here and Beyond,” which has a preview at Amazon, includes how faith was involved in her recovery from the ruptured aneurysm.

Justus also is a photographer with many of her pictures displayed online. When her photos with her poetry were on display at Lauritzen Gardens, someone liked her poetry and suggested she write more. and this book followed.

She said “anyone who’s faced a life-threatening condition … or who has lost a loved one … would find my story interesting and comforting.”