Rifka Kreiter

EVOLUTION OF A MEMOIR–EVERYTHING IN ITS OWN TIME

4 PM PDT  5 PM MDT  6 PM CDT  7 PM EDT

June 15, 2017

We are so pleased that Rifka Kreiter will be joining us. Her book Home Free will take us back to the era of the sixties, and the adventures that were life changing for Rifka. We all go on a journey into the past as we write our memoir, and we discover and uncover surprises, ahas, and “oh, I did that?” moments along the way. It’s a journey that ultimately is rewarding, and I’m glad that we get to speak with Rifka about the life story that has become her book, and her challenges along the way to write and publish her memoir.

From Rifka:

I will speak about the nearly twenty-year journey to publication of my book Home Free: Adventures of  child of the Sixties. The journey began with writing group pieces that seemed to cry out,  “We wanna be a book.”   Classes, workshops, writing groups followed, as well as long fallow periods, illustrating one teacher’s counsel that “for some pieces, you have to do more living before you’re ready to write it.”  And then there was the “onerous” publishing process, with its many trials.

Motivations that kept me going were:

• Self-examination: Coming to terms with my difficult personal history
• Fun: The pleasure of revisiting the experience of being young in that extraordinary time and sharing my stories of adventure
• Bearing witness: The deep satisfaction of describing the amazing grace that transformed my life. I felt, if only one reader found encouragement and hope in my story, that would make it worthwhile.

Members Will:

• Find out how to keep persisting despite obstacles to write the book of your heart.
• Be encouraged to find tools to free your inner writer, such as Morning Pages.
• Discover techniques I found helpful in dealing with the inner critic
• Learn about querying agents and publishers, and how I made the decisions I did.

Bio

An astrologer once told Rifka Kreiter that a certain planetary conjunction in her chart signifies “an unusual life, full of unexpected happenings,” and this has certainly proved true.

Home Free recounts her peripatetic early life in New York, LA and San Diego.  She studied acting at New York’s High School of Performing Arts, philosophy at City College of New York and Clinical Psychology at Adelphi University.  She has worked as a waitress, hatcheck girl and hearing researcher.  She was Continuity Director at a New York radio station and Assistant Convention Manager at the Concord Resort Hotel in the Catskill Mountains.

Since 1976 she has been following an ancient yogic path and she lived in a meditation ashram for ten years. Rifka currently teaches meditation and has a day job.  At age 55 she (finally) met her life partner, an Upper West Side psychotherapist.  They live happily together in suburban New Jersey.  Contact her at rifkakreiter.com.