Steve Lyon's Printable Information

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I was born in Los Angeles, California. My dad wrote for the Daily Racing Form, and we traveled all over the country when I was little, going from one racetrack to another. When I was older I became interested in music, and much of my work has been as a songwriter, composer, and performer. In fact, my novel The Gift Moves started out to be a song lyric! My wife told me it sounded more like a story than a song, and after that it just kept getting bigger.

Now I live in Lexington, Kentucky with my wife, George Ella Lyon (who has written many books for children) and our two sons, Benn and Joey. The Gift Moves is my first novel and I'm hard at work on another one.

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Author

Current Location: Lexington, KY

Honorarium:
The fee listed below is only the honorarium and does not include expenses which the hosting organization must pay for.

$700 for visits within an 80 mile radius of Lexington, KY (includes the Cincinnati OH metropolitan area)

$900.00 for all others

Full day includes any combination of large audience presentations or small group workshops with no more than three per day.

Program Description:

Large Assembly
I begin by reading from my work. Then I talk about the writing process itself and the way that stories grow from their characters. I speak about the difference between writing songs and writing fiction, and can perform some of the songs that appear in my novel where circumstances permit. I show students slides of my home and work space as well as slides of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the setting for my novel The Gift Moves. I close with a question and answer period.

Workshops

These are suitable for smaller groups.

The Singing Word

A songwriting workshop for musicians and non-musicians alike. I ask students to come up with interesting words and short phrases. We speak them aloud, listening for the rhythm that is always present in language. Students will begin to hear the natural music of speech, and as they do they will hear ways to put their words and phrases together. We'll assemble a song or two or three out of what students have contributed.

Making a World

Here students are asked as a group to create a world. I ask them to imagine a world somehow different from our own, perhaps on another planet or in another time, or just different in some significant way from what we know today. We then look at what it might be like to live in such a world, and pay special attention to the ways our imaginary world makes some situations and events more likely to happen and others less so.

Listening to Voice workshop

Here students are invited to listen to the voices of characters speaking to them, just as they might overhear a conversation in a restaurant or elsewhere, and to write down what they hear. I encourage them to be imaginative and open to whatever they hear. After writing, students share what they have written and speculate about how the characters revealed in their writing might live and act.

Writing Workshop

Students are given specific prompts and suggestions from which to write for a period of time. At the end of the writing time I invite students to share what they have written.