Judy Reeves
Captured Moments
July 25, 2025
11 AM PDT | 12 PM MDT | 1 PM CDT | 2 PM EDT
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“Life is not what one lived but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Our lives are filled with moments, large and small, from which we emerge a different person. Many of these moments may not, on the surface, seem significant. But there is something about each particular moment, perhaps not the event itself, but the feeling underlying it, that holds deeper meaning for you. It tells you something about yourself and your life. Stories are made up of such moments, one revealed and then another, as the question of the story seeks answers. We’re not just writing “this is what happened.” We’re writing, “This is what happened, and this is how it affected who I am.”
In this session, we’ll talk about ways to discover, uncover, and recover those moments of change in our lives. We’ll also discuss how to explore those moments, looking for connections and links that, when woven into a memoir, tell a story both personal and universal.
In our Captured Moments event audience members will:
- Discover how to capture the essence of a moment through a first thought, best thought exercise that invites a “scatter-page” of potential moment-memories to explore.
- Note the use of small details and how they can reveal secrets of the moment, including emotions, attitudes, relationships, and other meaningful information.
- Explore how the senses not only ground the writing in the physical world but also serve as an avenue into the emotions, and bring the reader deeper inside the story.
- Recognize the importance of slowing down to be in the moment where what might at first seem unimportant, in the slowing down, reveals something deeper.
- Review the benefit of spontaneous, timed writing sessions to capture the moment in raw, reckless first-draft writing that can then be edited, rewritten, polished, and generally made better. Sometimes it’s spontaneous, intuitive free-writing that reveals truths (and surprises) that otherwise might not be unearthed.
Bio
Judy Reeves is an award-winning writer and teacher who has published four books on the craft including A Writer’s Book of Days and Wild Women, Wild Voices, and a memoir, When Your Heart Says Go. She previously taught at UCSD Extension and has led community-based writing practice groups for thirty years. She serves on the council for the International Association for Journal Writing, teaches at writing conferences internationally, and at San Diego Writers, Ink, a nonprofit literary center she cofounded. Judy lives and writes in San Diego, amid bulging bookshelves and an ancient Underwood typewriter that claims its own social media fan base.
Links
Subscribe to my Substack: https://thelivelymuse.substack.com/
Visit my website: www.judyreeveswriter.com
