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©2008
FINE ARTS WORK CENTER
24 Pearl Street
Provincetown, MA 02657
phone: 508.487.9960
fax: 508.487.8873
www.fawc.orggeneral@fawc.org




Summer 2008 Program Links
Schedule of Workshops
Choosing A Workshop
Your Week at FAWC - Events & Times to Remember
Fees, Discounts, Cancellations
Scholarships, Internships, & College Credit
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General Rules
Alphabetical List of Instructors
 
REGISTRATION FORM


Writing Courses
Prose Workshops
Poetry Workshops
Visual Arts Courses
Studio Arts Workshops
Photography Workshops
Printmaking Workshops
2008 Events
2008 Readings, Slide Lectures, Exhibitions, and Special Events
2008 SUMMER PROGRAM:
PROSE WORKSHOPS

DEAN ALBARELLI
Crafting Fiction
JULY 20—25
1pm–4pm
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Open to all

When we send a manuscript out into the world, we're implicitly telling readers that we have something of consequence to communicate. Something worth their time and attention. Something that matters. Making good on that promise is largely a result of mastering the elements of craft. And, too, a result of achieving that elusive but essential narrative quality called "authority." This course will combine the advantages of workshop camaraderie and detailed manuscript commentary toward helping students hone their sense of craft and attune their sensitivity to matters of authority. A short exercise will be assigned at the first class meeting and workshopped later in the week.

Please send: a story or novel excerpt (20 pages maximum, double-spaced, 12-pt. font) by July 10; bring ten copies of the same piece with you to the Sunday orientation meeting.


bio photo 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 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."

GERRY ALBARELLI
Problems of Memoir
AUGUST 10-15
1pm-4pm
Type: Memoir
Price: $600
Open to all

Concerned with and respectful of the facts, but absolutely willing to rearrange them according to the reasonable demands of imagination, memoir is most interesting when it goes beyond the narrow concerns of the self to tell a larger story. Memoir can serve as the impetus for imagining other lives, other realities, and as the story of a particular time and place. It should be open: to fact-like dreams, dreamlike landscapes, history. This is a workshop for those working in the memoir form who are interested in an expanded definition of that form, who are writing on the border between autobiography and fiction, fact and fantasy, prose and poetry. There will be writing assignments; we'll read and discuss our own work as well as the work of Clarice Lispector, Isaac Babel, Elias Canetti, Driss Ben, Hamed Charhadi, and Grace Paley.


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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 2008. and is an associate Fellow at Yale.

SARAH BLAKE
Beginning Fiction: What Have You Got?
JUNE 22—27
1pm-4pm
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Beginner

This workshop is for those of you who have pages of notes, scraps of ideas, voices in your head—but are flummoxed by how to shape them. We'll spend each class writing together, then working to develop the necessary questioning eye: to see what we have, and how we might begin to shape it. What is interesting? What is fruitful? What is ridiculous? What is ridiculous and fruitful? How do we move from an image to an idea? From an idea to a sentence? From a sentence to a paragraph? To a story? We'll read stories and poems by selected authors as well as what we produce in class to get you reading as a writer and learning to see what you've got.

Please bring: one page or poem by your favorite author to the first class.


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Sarah Blake is the author of the novel Grange House (Picador, 2000), a chapbook of poems Full Turn (Pennywhistle, 1989), and has just completed her second novel, Frankie's War. Her essays and reviews have appeared in US News and World Report, The Chicago Tribune, and Good Housekeeping.

AMY BLOOM
Fiction Workshop
JULY 27—August 1
9am–12N
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Intermediate to advanced

"Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better." Samuel Beckett's line and the only way I know to approach writing fiction. We will look at other writers' most successful bits, identify our own strengths and weaknesses (in prose, plotting, narrative voice and persona) and figure out what to do about them. Focus will be on each student's problem areas, with reading and rewriting. Kind but relentless attention will be paid and expected. This class is suitable for intermediate and advanced writers meaning if you have never completed a piece of fiction (short story or chapters of a novel), this is not for you. Each person will be given the opportunity to revise one piece of work and begin a new one.

Special instructions: Make copies of whatever section of your work you'd like discussed (15 double-spaced pages maximum) and send two copies to FAWC by July 11th. Come prepared to discuss what you think are the central problems with the piece.


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Amy Bloom is the author of two short story collections, Come To Me and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You; a non- fiction book, Normal; and two novels, Love Invents Us and Away. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and she's received the National Magazine Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, in the O. Henry Awards: Prize Stories and in various anthologies here and abroad.

BRIAN BOULDREY
Artful Style: The Personal Essay
JULY 6—11
1pm-4pm
Type: Nonfiction
Price: $600
Open to all

Through the art of the personal essay, this class will focus on both brushing up the grammar and finding artful ways of deploying the elements of style. Each day, we will discuss, through a writer's eye, the precision and freedom that can help define personal style through its parts: punctuation, diction, syntax, rhythm, and irony. Part lecture, part discussion, part exercise, part workshop, part learningby- doing, I guarantee you'll never have so much fun discovering how to make your sentences—and all your prose—beautiful.

Please send: ten copies of a personal essay or other work of nonfiction prose to FAWC by June 16. You'll receive the work of your peers in advance of class, as well as a few short writing and reading assignments.


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Brian Bouldrey is the author of Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica. He has written six books and edited six anthologies, including three volumes of Best American Gay Fiction. His edited collection, Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men won a Lambda Literary Award and his memoir Monster: Adventures in American Machismo was a Lambda finalist. He is the author of the novel The Boom Economy: Or, Scenes from Clerical Life, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press. He is a Senior Lecturer and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University, and also serves on the faculty of Lesley University's MFA in Creative Writing
www.brianbouldrey.com

BROCK CLARKE
Fiction Writing
JULY 27—August 1
9am–12N
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Open to all

In this workshop we will (of course) be workshopping your fiction, and as we do so we'll also be reading stories and novel excerpts with an eye toward what we can get out of them. What do these works of fiction teach us about point of view, plot, voice, narrative tension, structure, suspense, release? And how can we apply these lessons to our own fiction?

Please send: two copies of 20 double-spaced pages maximum to FAWC by July 11th.


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Brock Clarke is the author of four books of fiction including, most recently, the novel An Arsonists' Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (2007). His short stories and essays have appeared in Virgina Quarterly Review, Georgia Review, New England Review, One Story, Missouri Review, The Believer, and on NPR's "Selected Shorts," and have been reprinted in the New Stories from the South and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He's twice been a National Magazine Award for Fiction finalist. He teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.

KATHRYN DAVIS
Fiction Workshop: A Novel Approach
JUNE 22—27
9am–12N
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Intermediate to advanced

This workshop is geared toward those intermediate to advanced writers interested in playing with the formal possibilities of the novel (as opposed to the short story).
An assignment for the first meeting: Imagine a novel in 15 chapters. You don't need to know the plot, etc., all you need to do is imagine the existence of this hypothetical work. Now, give it a title. Invent 15 chapter headings. And finally, select one of the headings and write that chapter. (It's the shortest chapter in the book— 5 pages max.).


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Kathryn Davis's sixth novel, The Thin Place, was published in January 2006. Her many honors include the Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is currently Fannie M. Hurst Senior Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis. Her previous books are Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell, The Walking Tour, and Versailles.

DAVID GESSNER
Writing from Place
JUNE 22—27
1pm–4pm
Type: Nonfiction
Price: $600
Open to all

This is a workshop in creative nonfiction with a special emphasis on writing about place. We will explore the role that writing about places—sometimes natural places, sometimes not—can play in writing personal essays and memoir. For nonfiction writers who are stuck for a subject, place often unlocks other topics and deeper concerns. For some writers turning their minds to a specific place they care for—a home, a patch of woods, a beach—can prove a reliable muse. At the same time, writing about deeply knowing a place can make us feel a little mystical, even silly. As the great Alaskan writer John Haines said: "To express a place in art we need to take certain risks… we need intimacy of a sort that demands a certain daring and risk: a surrender, an abandonment." Or as Barry Lopez puts it, we need to "become vulnerable to a place." We'll attempt this in our work and our reading.


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David Gessner is the author of six books, including Return of the Osprey, Sick of Nature, and Soaring with Fidel. His essay, "Learning to Surf," won the John Burroughs award for best nature essay of 2006. His essays have appeared on NPR's "This I Believe" series and in many magazines and journals including The New York Times, Georgia Review, American Scholar, Orion, The Harvard Review, and the 2006 Pushcart Prize Anthology. He has taught Environmental Writing as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, and is currently a Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he also edits the literary journal of place, Ecotone.

JULIA GLASS
Fiction Workshop: Writing from Character
AUGUST 17—22
9am–1pm
Type: Fiction
Price: $725
Intermediate to Advanced

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: ten copies of a single short story or the beginning of a novel (20 doublespaced pages maximum) to FAWC by July 28. Specify on the first page if the work is an autonomous story or the beginning of a novel. IMPORTANT: if novel, beginning chapters ONLY.


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Julia Glass is the author of the novels Three Junes, winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction, and The Whole World Over (Pantheon). I See You Everywhere, her third book, will be published this fall. Glass's honors include three Nelson Algren Awards, the Tobias Wolff Award, the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella and the Ames Memorial Essay Award. She has also received fellowships from the NEA, the NY Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

ELANA GREENFIELD
Playwriting Workshop Intensive
AUGUST 10—15
1pm-4pm
Type: Playwriting
Price: $600
Open to all

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 workshopping an 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 your 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" (photo, postcard, an object you can easily carry, etc.) to the first class, which in some way speaks to you to the project you will be working on.


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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.

JOHN HASKELL
Fiction Workshop
JULY 13—18
1pm-4pm
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Intermediate to Advanced

This workshop will explore the ways in which fiction and non-fiction collude to create literary reality. We will examine a variety of narrative strategies, focusing on using "real" events to communicate ideas and emotions. Participants will look for moments in their work in which the writing has come alive, and then expand those moments with an eye to sustaining their imagined reality. During the week a special emphasis will be placed on oral presentation as a way to explore voice and musicality and performance.

Please send:

Please send: two copies of a piece you'd like to workshop (15 double-spaced pages maximum) to FAWC by June 30, and bring 10 copies of the same piece to our Sunday orientation meeting.


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John Haskell is the author of a short-story collection, I Am Not Jackson Pollock (FSG, 2003) and the novel, American Purgatorio (FSG, 2005). His stories and essays have appeared on the radio ("The Next Big Thing," "Studio 360") and have been published in, among other books, The Show You'll Never Forget, The Best American Non-Required Reading, Yours in Food, and All the More Real. He has contributed to a number of magazines including Black Clock, A Public Space, n+1, Conjunctions, McSweeney's, and The Believer. His work has been translated into more than ten languages, and in 2007-2008 he was visiting professor at the University of Leipzig.

DAVID HAYNES
Stepping Up Your Game
JULY 20—25
9am–12N
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Open to all

This workshop is designed for writers who feel like they've got a handle on most of the basics and are now looking for the next set of tools to move their writing forward. Our draft stories as well as examples of published fiction will direct us toward the gaps in our various craft repertoire. My goal is for each writer to leave with a stronger sense of the issues in their own work and with an increased confidence in the possibilities of the stories yet to come. In order to have some common texts, please read the most recent edition of either Best American Short Stories, the O'Henry Prize Stories or both.

Please bring: 11 copies of your fiction (15 pages maximum, double-spaced, 12-pt. font) to the first class.


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David Haynes directs the creative writing program at SMU, and also teaches for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. In 2004 he served as fiction mentor for Minnesota's Loft Mentor Series, joining an exclusive group of writers who have both participated in the program and later served as mentors. During the spring of 2006 he was the Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is the author of six novels for adults and five books for younger readers. In 2004 his most recent adult novel, The Full Matilda, was published by the Harlem Moon imprint of Broadway Books. He has received a fellowship from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and several of his short stories have been read and recorded for the National Public Radio series "Selected Shorts."

ROBIN HEMLEY
Prose Workshop: Blurring the Lines
AUGUST 17—22
9am–12N
Type: Fiction/Memoir/Nonfiction
Price: $600
Open to all

This course is designed for writers of prose who aren't sure WHAT they're writing. Memoir? Fiction? Something in-between? In this course, you'll come with a "prose blob." We'll discuss various forms and how your work might or might not fit, and where it might cross the delicate boundaries that sometimes confound us. If you're writing a memoir that wants to be a novel or a novel that wants to be a memoir or something altogether distinct, then maybe this is the workshop for you.


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Robin Hemley is the author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction. He's published stories and essays in The New York Times, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and many other magazines and anthologies, including Sudden Fiction, Continued. His fiction has been heard on NPR's "Selected Shorts," performed on stage, and adapted into a short film. Awards for his work include the Nelson Algren Award, the George Garrett Award, Story magazine's Humor Award, the Independent Press Book Award, Foreword magazine's Award for Nonfiction, the Walter Rumsey Marvin Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. His book, Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday, was named an Editor's Choice Book of 2003 by the American Library Association. An anthology, Extreme Fiction: Formalists and Fabulists, co-edited with Michael Martone, was published in 2004. A new book, Do Over: A Middle-aged Man Takes a Second Shot at Youth's Disappointments, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2009. He is Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

PATRICIA HENLEY
Deep Characterization in the Short Story
AUGUST 17—22
9am–12N
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Open to all

Do you ever find yourself losing interest in a story before you've completed it? Chances are, you have not deepened the characters enough to sustain your own curiosity. This workshop will focus on the discovery of longings, fears, dreams, and desires—your own and your characters'. For there will inevitably be kernels of you in every character you invent. Using critiques, brainstorming, raw material writing exercises, readings from the work of Jungian author Jean Shinola Bolen, and Tarot experience, we will explore ways to deepen the characters in your story.

Please send: ten copies of a short story (no more than 15 double-spaced pages) to the Work Center by July 28. You'll receive the work of your peers in advance of class, as well as a few reading assignments.


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Patricia Henley's first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award and the New Yorker Fiction Prize (2000). Her second novel, In the River Sweet, was named a Best Fall Book by the St. Louis Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She has also published three collections of stories: Friday Night at Silver Star, The Secret of Cartwheels, and Worship of the Common Heart. Friday Night at Silver Star won the 1985 Montana Arts Council First Book Award. Her work has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Short Stories, Love Stories for the Rest of Us, and Circle of Women. Patricia has taught in the MFA Program at Purdue University for twenty years.

MARCIE HERSHMAN
Constructing Reflection: Memoir Workshop
JULY 13—18
9am–12N
Type: Memoir
Price: $600
Open to all

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-today 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.


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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 Foundation, the St. Botolph Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She teaches at Tufts University and in Lesley University's low-residency MFA program.

PAM HOUSTON
Advanced Short Fiction Workshop
JUNE 15—20
9am–1pm
Type: Fiction
Price: $725
Advanced

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.

What to bring: 11 copies of your fiction (maximum 16, 12-point, double-spaced pages) and read Rock Springs, by Richard Ford, and The Entire Predicament, by Lucy Corin.


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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.

CYNTHIA HUNTINGTON
Inventing Memory
JUNE 29— JULY 4
9am–12N
Type: Poetry/Fiction/Nonfiction
Price: $600
Open to all

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.


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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.

MATTHEW KLAM
Fiction Workshop
JUNE 15—20
9am–12N
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Open to all

Writers of all levels and exceptional people of every sort are encouraged to attend. A writing class is an experiment, and while there's no correct way to proceed, our class might read a little bit of outside material (quietly stunning, instructive/inspirational), do some in-class writing (explosive, surprising, fluent, ripe for expansion), and have plenty of time left to discuss your stories. The discussion will unfold in a gentle, helpful manner. A writing class is a risk in the same way that a writing endeavor is a risk. If you're going to give yourself some room to experiment in fiction writing, Provincetown in the summer is an excellent place to do that work.


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This year Matthew Klam's short fiction has been anthologized in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink. His first book, Sam the Cat and Other Stories (Vintage), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, GQ, Harper's, Nerve, and The New York Times Magazine. He has taught creative writing at the University of Michigan, American University and Stockholm University in Sweden. He is a recipient of a PEN/Robert Bingham Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Whiting Writers' Award, and an O. Henry Award.

JAMES LECESNE
Storytelling 101
JULY 27—AUGUST 1
9am–12N
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Open to all

Plays, short stories, screenplays, novels, dramatic monologues – a story takes many forms. 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 them into the world. The focus will be not only on writing and shaping our stories, but also on developing skills as storytellers.

Please bring: examples of your own work and a copy of A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams.


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James Lecesne has created several oneperson 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 this year by HarperCollins. An activist as well as an artist, Mr. Lecesne founded the "Trevor Project," the only 24- hour suicide prevention helpline for GLBTQ teens, and "After The Storm," a non-profit arts organization designed to benefit the youth of New Orleans.

SARA LONDON
Writing for Children: The Picture Book
AUGUST 10—15
9am–12N
Type: Children's writing
Price: $600
Open to all

As writers, how do we craft narratives for the unique word/image duet that defines the picture book genre? How do we attune our ears to the rhythms inherent in turning the page? Stories from 250 to 1000 words will be read and critiqued in class with careful consideration given to issues of subject, language, conflict, rhythm, pacing and humor. We'll consider ways of distilling a narrative down to its most essential and compelling components; discuss how and when to use dialogue; and how to freshen elements of character and plot. We'll also examine classics in the genre. During the week, students will revise their work and create "mock-up" picture books. Aspects of illustration will be discussed, but visual art talent is not necessary for this class. Time permitting, we'll conclude with tips on submitting a manuscript, finding an agent and editor, and book production.

Please send: one or two manuscripts (prose or poetry) for children ranging in age from three to eight to FAWC by July 28; bring ten copies of the same manuscripts to our Sunday orientation.


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Sara London is the author of Firehorse Max (HarperCollins), a selection of the Vermont National Education Association and the Missouri State Teachers Association; and The Good Luck Glasses (Scholastic). She has lectured on writing for children at the University of Vermont and at public libraries and schools across New England. A former fiction editor at Seventeen, she has also published poetry in various literary magazines and anthologies. She teaches creative writing and literature at Smith College, and reviews children's books for The New York Times Book Review.

PHILLIP LOPATE
Writing Memoir, Personal Narrative and Essay
JULY 20—25
9am–12N
Type: Nonfiction
Price: $600
Intermediate to Advanced

This workshop will focus on the writing of memoir-pieces (either chapters of book-length memoirs or free-standing personal narratives) and reflective essays. We will discuss ways of getting started, the creation of a credible narrator, the handling of delicate material, and literary strategies that have worked for masters of the form. (Students are urged to read the introduction and as much as they can of The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate and bring the book to class).

Please bring: 11 copies of one manuscript (30 pages maximum, double-spaced, 12-pt. font). Students are encouraged to bring more than one piece with them and we will critique as many as we have time to handle. There may also be exercises inclass and between sessions. The object is to enjoy ourselves while learning.


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Phillip Lopate is the author of three essay collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body), a book of film criticism (Totally Tenderly Tragically), and a teaching memoir (Being With Children). His most recent book of nonfiction is the urbanistic meditation Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan. His essays have been collected in Getting Personal: Selected Writings. He has also edited several anthologies, including his acclaimed Art of the Personal Essay and American Movie Critics: From the Silent Era to the Present. His work has been included in The Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize series; his many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and two NEA grants. He holds the Adams Chair in Humanities at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA programs of Columbia, the New School and Bennington.

ALICE MATTISON
Fiction Workshop
JULY 6—11
9am–12N
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Open to all

We’ll talk respectfully but honestly about one another’s stories and novel excerpts, seeking ways to revise them and assuming that every piece of fiction will need many revisions before it becomes what it should be. We’ll speak especially often of structure, of the shape of a short story or of the way the excerpt we’re reading will eventually fit into a novel. We’ll also write a little and discuss that process, and read a few examples of short stories by other writers.

What to bring: Participants should bring eleven copies, double-spaced, of a story or novel excerpt, 20 pages at most.


bio photo BIOGRAPHY

Alice Mattison's new novel, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten In Brooklyn, will appear in the fall of 2008, and an excerpt from it was recently published in The New Yorker. She is the author of eight earlier books of fiction, including the story collection In Case We're Separated (a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Connecticut Book Award in Fiction) and the novels The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman, The Book Borrower, and Hilda and Pearl. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize, as well as Ploughshares, Ms. Magazine, The Threepenny Review, Agni, Shenandoah, Writer's Chronicle, Glimmer Train, and many other journals. She teaches fiction in the Bennington Writing Seminars and has also taught at Yale.

RICHARD MCCANN
Taken From Life: Autobiography and Fiction
AUGUST 3—8
9am–1pm
Type: Fiction/Memoir
Price: $725
Open to all

"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.


bio photo 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 FAWC Board of Trustees and the Board of Directors of the PEN Faulkner Foundation.

PAMELA PAINTER
Quick, Sudden, Flash: Writing the Short Short Story
JULY 6—11
1pm-4pm
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Open to all

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.


bio photo 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. She currently teaches in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Program at Emerson College.

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS
Writing the Primal Story
JUNE 29—JULY 4
1pm–4pm
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Advanced

This is a workshop for those who are writing their way to the heart of their own material. Any story can be "primal" if it reaches deep enough, but we'll start with a few texts in common: please read James Agee's A Death In The Family, William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows, Katherine Anne Porter's classic story, "The Grave," and Delmore Schwartz's story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." Think about these between now and June, and please bring them with you.

Please send: 10 copies of one story, 25 double-spaced page limit, to FAWC by Monday, June 2. Students will be asked to type a critique of each story upon to which base class discussion; the critiques will then be given to the writer as a help in revision. We'll discuss each story on its own terms, from theme, character, language and structure, to line edit.


bio photo 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 for the UK's Orange Prize). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEAs, a Bunting Fellowship, a FAWC Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination and a 2004 Howard Foundation Fellowship. She was awarded The Sue Kaufman Prize (1980) and an Academy Award in Literature (1997) by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Excerpts from her forthcoming novel, Termite (Knopf, 2009), have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Narrative Magazine. She currently directs the MFA Program at Rutgers Newark.

NAHID RACHLIN
Building Full, Real Characters
AUGUST 10-15
1pm-4pm
Type: Fiction/Memoir
Price: $600
Open to all

To reach readers, whether in fiction or personal memoir, it is important to develop believable, three-dimensional characters. How do you create complex, real people within the context of plot, dialogue, viewpoint, voice? This is the question we will try to answer. The class sessions will be mainly devoted to students' own work— short stories, chapters of novels, novellas or personal memoirs—which we will read and comment on. If time permits I will also give class exercises. In the first session we will devote some time to a general discussion of the craft of writing fiction and memoir and also cover some publishing aspects of writing—how to go about getting an agent, writing a cover letter, what to expect from the publishing world today. The criticism will be constructive. We will point out strengths as well as weaknesses and make suggestions for improvement.

Please bring: 15 double-spaced pages to the first class.


bio photo BIOGRAPHY

Nahid Rachlin went to MFA programs at Columbia University and Stanford University. Among her publications are four novels, Foreigner, Married to a Stranger, Heart's Desire, and Jumping Over Fire; a short story collection, Veils; and a memoir, Persian Girls. Her individual stories have appeared in more than fifty magazines and she has written reviews for the New York Times. Among the grants and awards she has received are a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford). Presently she teaches at the New School University and is an associate Fellow at Yale.

VICTORIA REDEL
Explorations in Voice: Fiction Workshop
AUGUST 3—8
1pm-4pm
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Open to all

Much is made of finding voice on the page. But how is voice, in both first- and thirdperson, achieved in fiction? Is our voice in prose anything close to our voice in the world? In this workshop we'll look at our short stories, and do daily experiments in voice utilizing syntax, diction, acoustics, and image-making all as ways to sound more exorbitantly stanced on the page. These experiments invite us to explore sounds that we inhabit, or that are already part of our internal reservoir but seem too plain, too unliterary or just wrong. We'll explore sounds heard in the landscapes of childhood and the complex music heard daily around us. We'll also read the work of other writers with regard to how they achieve authority in their fiction.


bio photo BIOGRAPHY

Victoria Redel is the author of two books of poetry and three books of fiction. Her most recent novel is the Border of Truth. Her novel Loverboy won the Mariella Gable Novel Award, and was a Borders Original Voice and Paperback Book Club Featured Selection. The film adaptation, directed by Kevin Bacon, was nationally released in April 2006. Her work has been in numerous journals including BOMB, Antioch Review, Missouri Review, StoryQuarterly and Epoch. A recipient of the Tom and Stan Wick Poetry Prize, poetry fellowships from the NEA and FAWC, and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award, she currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.

LIZ ROSENBERG
Starting A Novel
AUGUST 3—8
9am–12N
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Open to all

Obviously you cannot FINISH a novel in a week, but you certainly can get started on one. This workshop will give ideas on how to begin, and how to make it the rest of the way through—past terror, writer's block, plotting and other issues. We'll do in-class writing both to loosen up and generate material, and look at some of the ways other writers have begun their novels. On Becoming A Novelist by John Gardner is highly recommended. The structure of the workshop will be informal, friendly, and open to all kinds of definitions of "a novel." It is open to new and experienced writers.


bio photo BIOGRAPHY

Liz Rosenberg has published two award-winning novels, poetry, fiction, and books for young readers. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Quarterly, Bellevue Review and elsewhere. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University, where she won the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Her newest books are Demon Love and The Lily Poems (USA), both out in 2008, and Bread & Fire (Jerusalem, 2008), a collection of essays, for which she served as contributing editor.

CARLO ROTELLA
Nonfiction Storytelling
AUGUST 3—8
1pm-4pm
Type: Nonfiction
Price: $600
Open to all

As a nonfiction writer, whether journalist, essayist, memoirist, or historian, you have a duty to both the facts and their literary potential. You must tell a good story peopled with compelling characters and enlivened by vibrant prose, but you must also do justice to your material—your reporting, your research, your observations, all those notes that want to add up to something meaningful. We'll explore approaches to turning a mess of promising material into a story that's both true and beautiful, and has a coherent point. We will read and discuss examples of published work that engage this challenge in instructive ways, and we'll workshop student prose.

Please bring: one manuscript (12 doublespaced pages, 3000 words max.). The piece you select can be finished work, but it doesn't have to be; you may choose a work in progress, or one on which you are no longer making progress because you're stuck.


bio photo BIOGRAPHY

Carlo Rotella's third and most recent book, Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was a finalist for the Lost Angeles Times Book Prize. His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Harper's, The American Scholar, DoubleTake, Boston, The Believer, TriQuarterly, Raritan, Slate, and The Best American Essays. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award and Guggenheim, Howard, and Du Bois fellowships, and lectured in Bosnia on a U.S. Department of State Speaker and Specialist Grant. He teaches at Boston College.

MARTHA SOUTHGATE
The Breath of Life: Writing Rich Fiction
JULY 13—18
9am–12N
Type: Fiction
Price: $600
Open to all

In this workshop, we will pay close attention to how to make your fiction come alive on the page and places where the writer can bring the breath of life (through conflict, character and other tools of the trade) to his or her work. We will spend some time discussing how the fiction one loves can help you with your own work. We'll also talk about how serendipity and openness are crucial in all forms of fiction writing, especially longer works. You never know what's going to come into a novel that you never expected to find there.

Please send: two copies of 15-20 pages of work in progress (either a story or the beginning of a novel) to FAWC by June 30 and bring 11 copies of the same piece to our Sunday orientation meeting. Also, please read The Art of Subtext by Charles Baxter, paying particular attention to the essay "Creating a Scene."


bio photo BIOGRAPHY

Martha Southgate is the author of Third Girl From the Left, which was published in paperback by Houghton Mifflin in September 2006. It won the Best Novel of the year award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was shortlisted for the PEN/ Beyond Margins Award and the Hurston/ Wright Legacy award. Her previous novel, The Fall of Rome, received the 2003 Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named one of the best novels of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. She is also the author of Another Way to Dance, which won the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel. She received a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her 2007 essay "Writers Like Me" was published in the New York Times Book Review.
www.marthasouthgate.com.


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