TEACHERS and CLASSES
Elian Carbone
Elian Carbone is a songwriter and dancer currently living in Havana, Cuba. He is pursuing a master’s degree in counseling psychology and works seasonally as a co-coordinator for the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop in Washington State. Elian comes from a Syrian, Mexican, and Italian family, a colorful combination that drives his passion for community, narrative, movement, song, and food. As a voracious reader and music theory nerd, he works to find simple, economical, and interesting ways to marry lyric and composition, leaning on intuition, practical theory, and his mother as his guides.
Marie Eaton
Marie Eaton loves to mess with lyrics and melody in search of a song, and over years of teaching songwriting has developed tools and jumpstart exercises to get the creative juices flowing. She taught songwriting for many years at Fairhaven College, Western Washington University, as well as at PSGW, the Northwest Women's Music Celebration, the Bellingham Music Festival, and the Northwest Writers' Weekend. Marie is a published poet as well and brings the tools and craft of this form of creative writing to songwriting. For over forty years she's been part of a four-woman group, Motherlode, performing in venues from Vancouver, B.C. to Los Angeles, and from all these years of performance has honed the ability to engage audiences, inviting them to think, sing, cry, and laugh together. With Motherlode she recorded seven CDs, featuring many of her own songs, including recent releases, Circle on the Sand, Live and Laughing, and Coming Home. She also has a solo album, I've Got a Secret.
Geof Morgan
Geof Morgan was raised in New England and began playing guitar at fourteen. He spent nine years in Nashville as a commercial country-western songwriter and recording artist before moving to Bellingham in 1982. He found a second career as a community organizer in 1989 but has never stopped writing and performing. He has taught songwriting and guitar privately and at music camps and retreats for over forty years. He is excited to be working with Karee to help build a community for songwriters (a “wonder”) in Whatcom County.
Karee Wardrop
Co-Founder and Coordinator of A Wonder of Songwriters Festival, Karee also founded (2008) and coordinates the Northwest Writers' Weekend. She has taught songwriting, creative writing, and visual art at Northwest Women's Music Celebration and visual art at Moab Folk camp. When faced with a conundrum or a creative problem to solve she says, "Let's just try...we'll learn something!"
Janet Peterson
Janet—40+ year member of Motherlode, folk cellist and song collector and interpreter—also runs camps: Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, California Coast Music Camp, Moab Folk Camp, Northwest Women's Music Celebration, and Northwest Writers' Weekend. She's taking a fun turn for this event to cook delicious meals!
CLASSES
STORYTELLING TECHNIQUES FOR SONGWRITERS
Elian Carbone
Discover lyric writing tools & strategies to sharpen your skills as an effective storyteller. Identify scenes, build backstory, raise the stakes, develop structure, find your arc, magnify the emotion, create spotlights, and understand prosody (how lyric and music composition inform one another). We'll analyze existing works and use them as scaffolding for our writing.
SONGWRITING JUMPSTART!
Marie Eaton
In this session, we will explore the tools and craft of songwriting through a series of fun (and maybe a little risky) exercises that will lead toward songs. We'll discuss techniques, strategies and blocks, the roles and interrelationships of melody, rhythm, lyric and song forms. Previous songwriting experience is not necessary, but participants should come with a willingness to take some risks.
STRETCHING OUR SONGWRITING VOICE
Geof Morgan
In this class, we will listen to and discuss several ways songs use lyric, structure, and music differently to tell their story. Picking a format we don’t normally use, we’ll all write from common prompt(s). We will share our beginnings and close with how to approach finishing and polishing our drafts.
SONG WORKSHOP
Geof, Karee, Elian, and Marie
Songs selected from participants' submissions will be workshopped in this session. Songs will be selected based on the variety they present (genre, melodic or harmonic themes, lyric forms or choices, etc,) so we can cover as much ground as possible for everyone's benefit. Being present for, and listening to a song being workshopped, even when it is not your own song, is a rich learning opportunity. Please read the submission information on the registration page.
Event Coordinators
Coordinators Geof and Karee have been writing in the same songwriting group since 2018. We've learned a lot...about songwriting, about how a group can support a writer, about friendship woven from song. And we still have so many questions! We want to bring songwriters together to learn from each other, to give and gain support, and to honor and explore this amazing art form.
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We send a giant thank you Devan Wardrop-Saxton for extensive technical help and guidance!