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PROSE WORKSHOPS
GERRY ALBARELLI Oral History and Creative Nonfiction August 2 - August 7 1pm-4pm Open to all Oral history reminds us that people are natural storytellers. The oral history interview also gives writers unusual access-to the past; to stories they may not have heard otherwise or that otherwise might never be told; to the liveliness of speech; to small worlds within our larger world. The oral history interview also poses a particular -- and particularly interesting -- challenge to writers: What do we do with multiple perspectives on a single event? How do we confront the mystery of what, if anything, actually happened? Students will learn basic techniques of oral history interviewing and will do some in-class interviewing. These practice interviews will serve as the basis for profile writing assignments. There will also be daily autobiographical writing assignments inspired by oral history's expansive approach to autobiography. Readings will include Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, Joseph Mitchell, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Anna Deveare Smith, Studs Terkel, Alessandro Portelli, Truman Capote, Grace Paley, Flora Nwapa, Studs Terkel, and selected published and unpublished oral history interviews.
A distinctive voice on the page is essential to the making of memorable, vibrant prose. But how does a writer find a voice, one that is entirely at home in the material? In this class we will explore the possibilities for the nonfiction voice as we write throughout the week. We will also discuss brief readings to help us understand how a writer's voice inhabits his or her work.
In this workshop we will examine students’ short stories or novel excerpts and in tandem look at hand-outs, to find important building blocks of characterization in fiction. Characters emerge from a writer’s latent desires and obsessions. In order to achieve characterizations with full dimension, our first organic impulses must be tempered by stylization of voice, craft techniques, and choices in story mapping. Writers should come with a bold and serious vision in their work. This workshop is for advanced students, individuals who have been writing seriously and who have studied writing in previous workshop settings. Please bring: 11 copies of a short story or novel excerpt (15-20 double-spaced pages or less) to the Sunday night orientation meeting to be handed out to class members prior to our first class meeting.
Some fiction writers find that their stories germinate from a single visual image, others from a moral imperative, still others from a title or an opening sentence. Many, however, follow the old adage "Character is plot." To put it more precisely, personality has consequence. When different personalities mingle and collide, the consequences blossom into drama and only when they are fully and deeply realized by the writer can the drama become genuinely compelling. We will discuss and revise your work-in-progress with an emphasis on character development as a way to strengthen narrative. Rigorous revision is essential, so bring work with the expectation of a major overhaul. One or two take-home exercises will help stimulate that process. Please send: 10 copies of a single short story or the beginning of a novel (20 pages maximum, double-spaced and 12 pt. type) to FAWC by July 24. Specify on the first page if the work is a stand-alone story or the beginning of a novel; again, beginning chapters ONLY.
Complete a first draft of a one-act play, or the first act of full-length play. In this workshop we will be doing intensive in-class writing exercises exploring character, structure, plot, rhythm and tone, as well as work shopping assigned number of pages each day. Participants will be expected to work very closely with one another during the process of completing their plays. Please read: 2 one-act or full-length plays of their choice (I’m glad to make suggestions) and be ready to speak in some way about your idea for the play you will write. Bring a "visual" (a photo, or a postcard, an object you can easily carry, etc.) to the first class, which in some way speaks to the project you will be working on.
The process of writing memoir is anything but straightforward. Although the bottom line is honesty, memoir asks more from us than a journal’s faithful account of remarks and chronologies. A memoir demands shape, focus, voice, and events that build toward force and meaning. This workshop is designed to break through the neatly factual surface of our day-to-day story. Rather than edit each other’s manuscripts-in-progress, we will focus on new ways to see our own material. We’ll do exercises to explore what lies at the heart of our individual searches and discuss how to draw the pieces together, devising strategies for an overall structure. Please bring ten copies of two to three pages from a published memoir that strikes you as distinctive, a small pocket mirror of your choosing, and paper and pens because we are going to write.
Writing begins in the concrete sights, smells, sounds, textures and tastes of the physical world. Our 20-hour week will focus on how we take all those glimmers, those hunks of the physical world that arrested our individual attention, and remake them in language, how we might combine them with other, unrelated hunks of sensory detail and allow for the alchemical event that turns words into story. We will talk about the difficult moments when writing feels like juggling an apple, a chainsaw and a toaster, and celebrate the rare but intoxicating moments when the place we were most afraid to go did not kill us after all. We’ll address structure, narrative tension, voice, point of view, dialogue, beginnings and endings. Please bring: 11 copies of your fiction (maximum 16 pages, 12-point, double-spaced) and read The Gateway, by T.M. McNally, and Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout.
Memory is creative work, compounded of fact, fantasy, and imagination. Transformed by distance in time and space, our memories are slippery stuff. In this workshop we'll explore the complementary roles of fantasy, myth, and accident in imagining memory. We’ll be less concerned with recovering what "actually" happened than with uncovering the poetic structures, mythic resonance and psychic weight of memory. Exercises in both poetry and prose forms will help us reach into old territory with our imaginations, subjecting the past to the creative work of our remembering. We'll generate new work, and discuss what we've written with generous curiosity.
Margaret Atwood once wrote, "Children do not find one another to be cute. To each other, they are life-sized." Life-sized adolescent protagonists are at the heart of many of the most enduring works of American literature. Classics such as To Kill A Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, and The Catcher in The Rye are but a few examples. Although this is not a class in young-adult fiction, we will focus on creating believable voices for young characters and also developing the "kidscape" which is a rich and complicated world against which these characters work out the issues of their complicated and rich lives. (I like to think of The Kidscape as a culture within a culture with its own cuisine, dress, language, disciplinary code, etc.) In this class students will read contemporary short stories featuring young characters by authors such as Michael Cunningham, Julie Orringer, and ZZ Packer. In addition to lively group critique, we will also complete a number of writing exercises to jog our own memories of childhood and translate these memories into meaningful artistic expression. This workshop is open to writers at all levels, and is NOT a class in writing Young Adult fiction. Please send: 10 copies of one story or OPENING chapter of a novel (stories are preferred) by June 1. 25 double-spaced page limit. Please read the stories "Pilgrims" by Orringer, "Brownies" by Packer, and "White Angel" by Cunningham before class. (All are available on line.)
This workshop for both experienced and novice playwrights will enable participants to hear their plays aloud and benefit from immediate response in a professional setting. Students should submit ten copies of one short scene from a full-length or one-act play to the Work Center by Monday, June 1.
In this class we will read and write and talk about autobiographical essays from a spiritual and philosophical point of view, and how the essay can provide the writer with a platform eventually imagined as a book-length memoir. In the course of the week we will uncover what subject matter matters most to you and, more importantly, how that subject matter informs language and sight and voice so that the essay and/or memoir becomes a belief system ranging from the seemingly mundane to the utterly mysterious—the enigma of life happening to you. Please bring two recent pieces you have written.
Whether we speak through the voices of characters or allow ourselves to use our own voice, each story is the myth of our lives struggling to be heard. This workshop is designed to explore our individual myths, give voice to our emotional, political, and personal truths and create a structure that will carry us into the world. The focus will be not only on writing and shaping the stories of our lives, but also on developing skills as storytellers, screenwriters or playwrights. This is a class for performers and non- performers alike. Please bring: an example of your own work and be prepared to present it to the class. Also read A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams and bring a copy with you to class.
Novelists are often lonely as they set sail to distant destinations with vague maps and high hopes. In this workshop we’ll discuss how to make better preparations for the journey, and how to avoid being becalmed, or shipwrecked, en route. I am hoping that everyone will bring the first twenty pages of their novels in progress and a synopsis to workshop so that we can discuss such issues as voice, characterization, structure, suspense, subplots, setting, the role of the chapter, how to pass time and other novelistic concerns.
Most of our time will be spent on honest but respectful talk about one another’s stories and novel excerpts, thinking most often about structure. We’ll decide together what to keep, what to change or reorganize, and what to omit, trying to make each piece of fiction not just convincing and well-written, but ambitious: as emotionally far-reaching as it can be. We’ll read a few masterful short stories to give us courage, and we’ll also write a little, taking advantage of Provincetown’s vibrant street life to study dialogue where there are many voices to hear, and to think about how plot may be constructed in a town where stories are being played out all around us. Past classes have quickly turned into friendly, helpful groups. Please bring eleven copies of up to twenty pages—generously double spaced—of a short story or a novel excerpt that you plan to revise.
The age-old adage of "writing what you know" will come under the microscope in this advanced fiction workshop. In the context of contemporary short stories, we’ll discuss the imaginative leaps of faith that writers attempt to make when entering a world that is not supposedly theirs. How do we write about lives so different from our own? Is it an act of arrogance to write out of gender, race, time? Please bring: The Art of the Story (edited by Daniel Halpern) and a short story of your own (11 copies). We’ll workshop the story and also begin a new story that will hopefully surprise us as much as our readers.
"The secret in writing," writes Dorothy Allison, "is that fiction never exceeds the reach of the writer’s courage… until I started telling the stories that were hardest for me, writing about exactly the things that I was most afraid of and unsure about, I wasn’t writing worth a damn." In this intensive workshop for prose writers of all levels, we’ll work toward the writing of those life stories—whether in fiction or in memoir—that seem the hardest and most necessary to tell. We’ll spend half our time on generative exercises designed to help us locate the images that contain the stories of our lives, and half in critical discussion of student works-in-progress. Please bring: 6 snapshots of your life and 11 copies of fiction, memoir, or personal essay (8 double-spaced pages maximum) derived from actual life.
PAMELA PAINTER Come with several very short stories, or come empty-handed, but do come ready to write new stories—one a day. This workshop will focus on the short short story form—stories that range from 250 to 500 words. We’ll be writing a "list" story, a one-sentence story, a "he said/she said" story, and many more, often using a story from MicroFiction, Flash Fiction, or Flash Fiction Forward as a "model." You will also learn how to create your own "exercises" for writing the next twenty short shorts after this workshop ends. Everyone—yes, everyone will leave this workshop with new, publishable stories.
This is a workshop for those fiction writers or poets who want to write with the economy, precision, intensity and ear required by the composition of short, one- to three-page fictions. Short shorts, or 'Flash Fictions,' require the narrative skills of the fiction writer and the finely tuned ear of the poet. See "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" by Rilke, "Scars Make Your Body More Interesting," by Sherril Jaffee, "No One's A Mystery," by Elizabeth Tallent, or the one-page fictions in Black Tickets, by Jayne Anne Phillips, as examples. A reading list will be sent to students upon registration. Students will also respond to assignments during the week, completing a short collection of one-page fictions that may or may not be thematically related. Please send: 10 copies of four fictions that are complete in one to three pages to FAWC by June 15, and bring those same four fictions to class; the work will be mailed in advance of class to the workshop group so that all can respond in advance with typed critiques that each writer can later use as suggestions for revision.
How much can you achieve by reworking a paragraph, a sentence, a burst of dialogue? Often, enough to deepen the effect of an entire piece. We will read and work to rewrite scenes from each class member, keeping in mind Melville’s directive: "Why do you try to enlarge your mind? Subtilize it." Please send: up to 10 pages of prose to FAWC by Monday, June 8, and bring 10 copies of it with you to class.
How do we find the right first sentence, the right first page that sets the stage for the rest of a book? Often, as F.Scott Fitzgerald wrote, with "a hundred false starts." This class will focus on the various ways to get through those false starts and find the voice that is required to take the reader on the journey you offer. We will do in-class exercises, and discuss the work presented in class, finding new ways to make new beginnings. Please bring: ten pages of your own work (10 copies), as well as a copy of the first page of your favorite novel (10 copies).
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BIOGRAPHY
Dean Albarelli is the author of Cheaters and Other Stories (St. Martin’s), a selection of the Barnes & Noble series "Discover Great New Writers." A chapter from his forthcoming novel became a prizewinning short film with Amanda Peet. Twice a Fellow at FAWC, he is the recipient of a Michener Award, a grant from the Vermont Arts Council, and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He is an advisory editor with The Hudson Review, and has been writer in residence at Smith College, and visiting writer at Amherst and Trinity colleges. At the University of Virginia, a Student Association survey ranked his fiction-writing course among the "20 Most Popular Classes on Campus."
BIOGRAPHY
Gerry Albarelli is the author of Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva, and co-author of two guides to oral history interviewing. His stories, poems and essays have been published in Global City Review, Fairleigh Dickinson Review, Sarah Lawrence Literary Review, Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, ItalianAmericana and The Breast: An Anthology. He teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and documentary film production at Eugene Lang College in New York City, and currently works for the Columbia University Oral History Research Office. His memoir, Mary, Queen of Immigrants, will be published in 2009.
BIOGRAPHY
Jane Brox's fourth book will be published by Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt in 2010. She is the author of Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm; Five Thousand Days Like This One, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction; and Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Her essays have appeared in The Georgia Review and other journals and magazines, and are included in many anthologies, including Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has been awarded grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. In 2005 she received the New England Book Award for Nonfiction. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University, and lives in Brunswick, Maine.
BIOGRAPHY
Maria Flook's most recent novel is Lux, (Little, Brown and Company). She is also the author of the nonfiction books Invisible Eden, A Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod and My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance; the novels Open Water and Family Night, which was awarded a PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation; and a story collection, You Have the Wrong Man.Her awards include a 2007 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for fiction, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and FAWC. Ms. Flook is Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College.
BIOGRAPHY
Julia Glass is the author of the novels Three Junes, winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction, and The Whole World Over. Her most recent work of fiction is I See You Everywhere. Glass has also published feature articles and essays in numerous national magazines and anthologies, including An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family (edited by Nell Casey) and Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes From the Midlife Underground (edited by Kim Barnes and Claire Davis). She has received fellowships from the NEA, the NY Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
BIOGRAPHY
Elana Greenfield's book, At the Damascus Gate: Short Hallucinations won the New American Fiction Competition. She is a recipient of a Whiting Writers" Award in drama, and The Judith S. Pearson award for her short story "Talent." Her work for the stage has been seen both internationally and nationally and has been presented in NYC, at La Mama E.T.C., The Vineyard Theatre and the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, among others. Her play, Nine Come, has recently been included in New Downtown Now: An Anthology of New Theater from Downtown New York. Her articles have appeared in Yale"s Theater magazine, her plays excerpted in Bomb Magazine and her radio plays heard on WNYC, The Radio Stage and public radio stations across the country. She currently teaches playwriting at The New School University"s Eugene Lang College, and at NYU Tisch Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing.
BIOGRAPHY
Marcie Hershman is the author of the novels Tales of the Master Race and Safe in America, and the memoir, Speak to Me: Grief, Love and What Endures. Her essays and reviews have appeared widely: The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Poets & Writers, Tikkun, Agni, Ms., ArchitectureBoston, Ploughshares, in anthologies, and on NPR. Among her awards are those from the Bunting Institute/Harvard University, the L.L.Winship/Boston Globe Foundation, the St. Botolph Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She teaches at Tufts University and in Lesley University's low-residency MFA program.
BIOGRAPHY
Pam Houston is the Director of Creative Writing at U.C. Davis. She is the author of three books of fiction, Cowboys Are My Weakness (winner of the Western States Book Award), Waltzing the Cat (winner of the WILLA Award for Contemporary Fiction), and Sight Hound; a play, Tracking the Pleiades; and a memoir titled A Little More About Me. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards Prize Collection, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is working on a book called Flight.
BIOGRAPHY
Cynthia Huntington is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, The Radiant, from Four Way Books, and a prose memoir, The Salt House. She lives in Vermont and teaches writing at Dartmouth College and in the MFA in Writing Program at Dartmouth College.
BIOGRAPHY
Tayari Jones's first novel, Leaving Atlanta (awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award), is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of The Atlanta Child Murders of 1979. Her second novel, The Untelling, won the Lillian C. Smith Award.Jones has won fellowships and awards from United States Artists Foundation, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, Illinois Arts Council, Arizona Council on the Arts, G.E. Foundation, LEF Foundation, The Corporation of Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony and other arts organizations.Her work has appeared in McSweeny's, Crab Orchard Review, PMS, The Believer, New Stories From the South, The New York Times and other publications.She is a contributor to The Daily Beast. A graduate of Spelman College, The University of Iowa, and Arizona State University, she teaches in the MFA at Rutgers-Newark University.
BIOGRAPHY
Wendy Kesselman's new adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank received a Tony Award Nomination and was produced on Broadway. Her plays include My Sister in this House; The Notebook; The Executioner’s Daughter; The Foggy Foggy Dew; The Last Bridge; I Love You, I Love You Not; The Juniper Tree; A Tragic Household Tale (Book, Music, Lyrics); Maggie Magalita; The Shell Collection; Merry-Go-Round; Becca (Book, Music, Lyrics); and A Tale of Two Cities (Book, Music, Lyrics). A member of the Dramatists Guild, she is the recipient of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the AT&T Onstage Award, the New England Theatre Major Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement, the first annual Playbill Award, the Roger L. Stevens Award, the Lecomte du Noüy Annual Award, and Guggenheim, McKnight and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Her screenplays include Sister My Sister; I Love You, I Love You Not; and Mad Or In Love. She won a Writers Guild of America award for her screen adaptation of A Separate Peace.
BIOGRAPHY
Michael Klein has published three books: 1990, a book of poems which won a Lambda Literary Award in 1993; Track Conditions: A Memoir; and a book of linked essays, The End of Being Known. He is currently working on a memoir called When I Was A Twin. He has been teaching at FAWC since 1995, and was a Fine Arts Work Center Fellow in poetry in 1990.
BIOGRAPHY
James Lecesne has created several one-person shows including Word of Mouth, which won a Drama Desk Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award. His short feature film, Trevor, received an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film and The Road Home, which featured stories of children of war, was presented at the Asia Society in NYC and at the International Peace Initiative at The Hague. He has adapted Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City for Showtime, and wrote one of the final episodes of Will & Grace. His new novel Absolute Brightness was published by Harper Collins. An activist as well as an artist, Mr. Lecesne founded the “Trevor Project,” the only 24-hour suicide prevention helpline for GLBTQ teens, and more recently he founded "After The Storm," a non-profit arts organization designed to benefit the youth of New Orleans.
BIOGRAPHY
Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands.After taking a BA in literature and philosophy at the University of York in England, she subsequently moved to North America where she has taught in numerous writing programs including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Boston University and the University of California at Irvine.She is the author of a collection of stories and six novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture and most recently The House on Fortune Street.She is a distinguished writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston, and a visiting writer at Bowdoin College in Maine.
BIOGRAPHY
Alice Mattison's novel Nothing Is Quite Forgotten In Brooklyn has just been published.Some of her previous novels and collections of short stories are The Book Borrower, In Case We’re Separated, and Men Giving Money, Women Yelling, all New York Times Notable Books.Twelve of her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, and her stories, essays, and poems have also been published in The New York Times, The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, The Women’s Review of Books, and elsewhere, and reprinted in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize.She lives in New Haven, Connecticut and teaches fiction in the low-residency MFA program at Bennington College in Vermont.
BIOGRAPHY
Colum McCann is the author of two collections of short stories and four novels, including Let the Great World Spin, published in June 2009. His fiction has been published in 28 languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and GQ among other places. In 2003 he was named Esquire magazine's "Writer of the Year." Other awards and honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Hennessy Award and the 2002 Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. His short film, Everything in this Country Must, was nominated for an Oscar in 2005.
BIOGRAPHY
Richard McCann is the author of Mother of Sorrows (Vintage, 2006), winner of the 2005 Zacharis Award and named by Amazon as one of the Top 50 Books of 2005, and Ghost Letters (1994 Beatrice Hawley Award, 1994 Capricorn Poetry Award). His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007, The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, and Best American Essays 2000.Awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the FAWC, and the Fulbright and Rockefeller foundations. He currently teaches at American University, and serves on the Board of Directors of the PEN Faulkner Foundation and is Member of the Corporation of Yaddo.
BIOGRAPHY
Pamela Painter is the author of two story collections, Getting to Know the Weather, winner of the GLCA Award for First Fiction, and The Long and Short of It. She is also co-author of the widely used textbook, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Quick Fiction, among others and in numerous anthologies, such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, and MicroFiction. A short-short collection is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her stories have been presented on stage by Word Theatre, Stage Turner, Symphony Space, and Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre.Painter lives in Boston and teaches in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Program at Emerson College.
BIOGRAPHY
Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of two widely anthologized collections of stories, Black Tickets and Fast Lanes; and three novels, Machine Dreams, Shelter, and Motherkind (nominated in 2001 for the UK's prestigious Orange Prize). Her novel, Lark and Termite, was published by Knopf in January 2009; excerpts have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Narrative Magazine. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship, a FAWC Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, a 2004 Howard Foundation Fellowship, and was awarded The Sue Kaufman Prize (1980) and an Academy Award in Literature (1997) by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She currently directs the MFA Program at Rutgers Newark. (www.mfa.newark.rutgers.edu)
BIOGRAPHY
Heidi Jon Schmidt is the author of The Bride of Catastrophe,
Darling?, and The Rose Thieves.Her stories have been published and
anthologized in places from The Atlantic Monthly to Nerve.com, The O'Henry
Awards to Best American Nonrequired Reading, and broadcast on NPR. Her new
novel, Oyster River, is forthcoming in 2010.
BIOGRAPHY
Elizabeth Strout is the author of the critically acclaimed Olive Kitteridge, a novel in stories.She is also the author of two previous novels, Abide With Me, a national bestseller, and Amy and Isabelle, a New York Times best seller, which won the LA Times Award for First Fiction, and the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune.It was also short listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award, as well as The Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have appeared in a number of magazines including Tin House and The New Yorker, and have also been included in Best American Mystery Stories.She is currently on the faculty of the low residency MFA program and Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina, and makes her home in New York City.