Robert Wolf began conducting non-traditional writing workshops in 1989. This was a time when writing workshops were geared for those with literary ambition. Wolf had something more interesting in mind. He wanted to create a literary mosaic of America written by working people without literary aspirations.
The American Mosaic Project began with a workshop for the homeless in Nashville and has since gone national. Due to a flurry of national publicity in the early 1990s with NPR’s All Things
Considered,Morning Edi
tion and an Associated Press story, magazines and newspapers began featuring stories on this unusual project.
Wolf was getting people who never thought of themselves as writers having fun while penning their experiences. This was a first! Small towns began hiring him to create portraits of their towns through community workshops.
In 1997, CBS Sunday Morning did an appreciative portrait of the writers in northeast Iowa—farmers and small town residents—whose work had been published by Free River Press. Since then we’ve given many more people the delight of crafting their own stories. A few even went on to write professionally.
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