THE TEACHER

Leslie Kirk Campbell, imagination activist, is the founder and director of RIPE FRUIT School of Creative Writing, now in its 15th year.

Highly praised as a teacher and "magical guide," Ms Campbell has led writing workshops internationally. More than 1500 students - lawyers, midwives, kindergarteners, octgenarians, and everything in between - have entered her "Greenhouse of the Imagination" where she has inspired and guided them in their pursuit of freedom, originality, and excellence in writing.

For the past 20 years, Campbell has specialized in designing and teaching classes in recognizing and eliciting creativity, finding and expanding voice, the alchemy of poetry, memoir as soulfood, intuitive editing, and growing the short story. With the confidence and craft they have gained, many of her students have been accepted to prestigious writing programs, published articles or books, and become writers in their own right.

A graduate of Stanford University and San Francisco State, Leslie has made it her mission to listen to the wealth of human voices inhabiting the earth. She traveled the world, living in Nicaragua, Thailand, and Florence, where she studied and translated modern Italian poetry and taught at the University of Firenze. A poet, playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer, Leslie is the author of Journey into Motherhood: Writing Your Way to Self-Discovery. She is currently at work on The Dawning, a book of prose poetry and short fiction, and The Writing Faith, a guide for living and thriving in the 21st century.

Leslie, a native Californian, lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons.

Read the new press release at Prime Newswire!
Ripe Fruit School to Help Writers 'Stir the Pot' at Sonoma 'Soul Food' Writing Retreat

See articles about Leslie Kirk Campbell "Lighting the Way" , 7/1999

Open Up In Memoir Workshop 7/07

See articles by Leslie Kirk Campbell in SFGate.com "What, Your Kid's Not at Miraloma Elementary?
One mother discovers great SF public schools you've never heard of." 3/05

BulletProof:When San Francisco teenage gun violence comes too close to home 4/07

The RIPE FRUIT Experience

RIPE FRUIT invites you to confront your ideas about your own limitations as a writer. You will be challenged to go deep, tell the truth, see what you have never permitted yourself to see and write what you have never written.

RIPE FRUIT frees you to use your imagination intensively through group writing, automatic writing, childhood writing, character writing and by writing in forms that are new to you.

RIPE FRUIT puts poetry back into your writing. Language, like culture, is fertile, generative, and above all, alive. You will become a language inventor rather than a language technician. Through practice, you will discover and express what is most important to you. Powerfully. Memorably. In a way that affects and moves people.

RIPE FRUIT cultivates your sensuality. You will develop your vitality of perception. You will rediscover what you knew as a child: how to pay attention to and notice what is around you - the details, smells, textures, colors, tastes, sounds, nuances of feeling. You will practice writing with all your senses finely tuned.

RIPE FRUIT trains you to see like a fine cinematographer, hear with the ear of a musician, perceive character, light, color, and composition like an artist. With new impetus and sensitivity, you will develop a keen and consistent awareness that will energize your writing. And, in fact, add excitement to every aspect of you life.

The RIPE FRUIT experience has been described by many as a new beginning at whatever stage of development.