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SARAH BLAKE What's the Plot? How to Catch the Tale July 25 30 1pm—4pm Tuition: $600 Open to all Plot— the armature of a story or novel, its narrative design— might easily be one of the most elusive yet essential elements in great fiction. Greater than merely what happens, a good plot works like the music of the spheres. This class is designed for serious writers who want to study great plots with their own struggles to construct plot in mind. Reading as writers, we will spend the first half of every class session discussing a story to detail and isolate how the plot is working and where you can see it doing its work. The second half of class will concentrate on each other's stories, or chapters, as seen through the lens of our discussion. Possible readings include: Aristotle, Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story, Alice Munro's "How I Met My Husband," Deborah Eisenberg's "Mermaids," Barbara Park's Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus, James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," Tobias Wolff's "Powder."
"The eye is often described as like a camera,
but it is the quite uncamera-like features of
perception which are most interesting. Let's
call this the 'internal eye,' and perception
is not determined by the stimulus patterns
of a picture, but rather it is a dynamic of
searching for the best interpretation of
available data." — R. L. Gregory Writers should bring to the first orientation meeting 11 copies (twenty-five pages or less, double-spaced, one-sided, and stapled) of a sample from a memoir in progress or another personal history example, to hand out to class members for discussion in workshop. If the sample is from a longer piece, a few lines of story summary would be helpful.
Frost would sometimes say at his readings that 'poems are about what you don't mean as well as what you do mean.' In our week together I'd like to examine this idea by thinking about the concept of "bewilderment" and how it gets acted out in our writing — either through syntax, our accessing the duende, leaps into the unconscious, or simply circling around what is unsaid, unknown, unrealized. Or, as Aristotle puts it, "The mind in the act of making a mistake." We will look for those moments we begin to stutter and stumble when telling our stories, or in what we've written so far, for these are the thresholds beyond which is unknown, beyond which is the white space on the map. Over the course of our week together we will attempt to push a little deeper into this shadow world.
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-inprogress 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 email a single short story or the beginning of a novel (20 pages maximum, double-spaced and 12-pt. type) to FAWC by Friday, July 30. 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 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 two 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" (a photo, 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.
While it's true that everyone has a story to tell, not everyone has the tools to tell that story. It doesn't matter whether you've lived an outwardly exciting and adventurous life or a life that seems, on its face, ordinary. It's all in the telling. But why write about yourself at all and who will be interested? Why delve into the past? Socrates said it best: the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if Aunt Bess is angry that you've written about her beatnik days in Greenwich Village? What if your brother says about a disastrous family vacation, "No, that's not the way it happened at all!" These and other questions will be answered in this course. In what form would it be best to write about your life: memoir or autobiographical fiction? Participants will be asked to bring an autobiographical piece of writing to the table to be critiqued, but we will also engage in generative writing exercises throughout the week.
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
with force toward 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,
we will focus on fresh ways to see our
own material. We'll do exercises to explore
what lies at the heart of our individual
searches and discuss how we might draw
the pieces together, devising strategies for
an overall structure.
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. Please bring 11 copies of your fiction (maximum 16 pages, 12-point, doublespaced) and read Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill, and The Book of Right and Wrong by Matt Debenham (pub. date: June 2010...former FAWC student!).
"Traveler, your footsteps/are the road,
nothing more;/ traveler, there is no road,/
you make the road by walking."
— Antonio Machado
Conflict turns up the volume on a quiet story. Dialogue takes a lukewarm plot and makes it hot. Setting turns Anytown, USA, to right here, right now. In this class we'll work at sharpening our fiction through workshop-style group critique, exercises, and reading the pros. We'll take our stories to the next level, tweaking sentences and scenes to add to our plot's motion, shape, and bite. Please email one story or opening chapter of a novel (stories are preferred) by Friday, August 6. 20 page (double-spaced) limit. You will be provided with a packet of readings, including stories by AM Homes, Julie Orringer, Jean Thompson, Michael Cunningham, and Edward P. Jones.
The basic foundation of any screenplay is story; without a strong story there's no screenplay. In this workshop we will cover three-act structure, plot and plot points, character development, conflict and suspense. We'll begin with a minitreatment or four-page outline, build a three-act structure, and create characters by putting them in tension-filled situations. By week's end you'll have the foundation story, structure and characters to begin writing a screenplay that producers and production companies will be able to develop into a feature film. Many novelists have also taken this course in order to jump-start their books; everyone is welcome. Please bring your laptop if you're able, and read Christopher Vogler's The Hero's Journey and my own How to Write A Selling Screenplay. Since it's important to read in the field, I would suggest reading screenplays, which you can get free online; go to Google and type "Free Movie Scripts." Please read as many screenplays as you can in the genre in which you'll be writing. If you have questions, please e-mail me at Keanewords@aol.com.
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. Please email one short scene from a full length or one-act play to the Work Center by Friday, June 4, and bring 10 copies of the same piece to class.
In this class well 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 mysteriousthe enigma of life
happening to you.
Whether you are working on a screenplay, a TV pilot, a stage play, a one-person show or a novel, the basic rules of storytelling can help you to discover the story that you want to tell. And whether you choose to speak through the voices of your characters or allow yourself to use your own voice, each story is the myth of your life struggling to be heard. This workshop is designed to explore your individual myth, give voice to your emotional, political, and personal truth, and create a structure that will carry these truths into the world. Though teasing a story out of yourself often takes years, this workshop will set you on your way and give you the tools to last a lifetime. Bring an example of your own work and be prepared to present it to the class. Also read the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams and bring a copy with you.
How do we know if a story from our own lives is worth writing— or worthy of reading? Is what we find most interesting about ourselves necessarily going to be interesting to a reader? And does that even matter? Or should we as writers tell our stories simply because we feel compelled to? These are some of the questions we'll explore in this weeklong seminar focusing on narrative, craft, and style in first person nonfiction writing. Students are encouraged to come to class with a few ideas for first person essays, one of which you will write during our week together.
Most of our time will be spent on honest but respectful talk about one another's stories and novel excerpts. We'll decide together what to keep, what to change or restructure, 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. Please bring eleven copies of up to twenty pages— generously double-spaced— of a short story you plan to revise or an excerpt from an unfinished novel; we'll be glad to discuss the pages before us, or, with your input, your novel's direction and final shape. Past classes have quickly turned into friendly, helpful groups.
"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.
HOWARD NORMAN This is a workshop in first person nonfiction writing. It will be an intense weeklong investigation into the possibilities of working in various genres: travel writing, epistolary, memoir, personal essay, and others. Please read A Match to the Heart, by Gretel Ehrlich, before the workshop begins. I will hand out work to read and discuss on a daily basis. Upon registration, I'll email writing assignments and a schedule, so that you will have time to begin writing before the course begins.
JOSIP NOVAKOVICH We'll discuss and sketch plot possibilities, stemming out of highly individuated characters and strange settings, using the element of threat as the igniting agent to set events into motion. Usually, if a writer sets up the pieces in a dynamic enough relationship, plots are easy to develop and to drive to a natural (or supernatural) conclusion. Even if we have realistic characters, we still need to make sure that we anchor them in some kind of passion, motivation, which, the clearer and more powerful it is, the more energy it can create for our story. Every participant in the workshop gets a free copy of my Fiction Writer's Workshop textbook, which contains analyses of a variety of possible plots, a bunch of generative exercises, and examples from literature illustrating different angles of vision in fiction. We'll all read the stories in the textbook/anthology and also the participants' chapters or stories, 20 pages (double-spaced, 12 pt. font) per participant, for constructive in-class critique. In addition we'll do some in-class writing and a bit of homework, sketches of scenes with plenty of suspense and threat.
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, have a narrative arc, and every word matters. 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 Flash Fiction, Micro Fiction or Flash Fiction Forward as a model. You will also learn how to create your own "exercises" for writing the next twenty short short stories after this class is over. Everyone — yes, everyone— will leave this workshop with new, publishable stories.
The only way I learn anything is by doing it. So for the week, we're going to generate new material using nutsand- bolts exercises, and we're going to read a handful of good new American plays written in a variety of styles to see what they have to teach us. Your level of experience or familiarity with the form is unimportant. Just come on day one with ideas, questions, and pen and paper. Then we'll have five days to make theater.
No one exactly owns the stories that belong to a family, but we can all find and claim them. We'll be trying everything from memoir (what was your own place in your family) to brief family biographies, to stories that live on and get passed down from generation to generation. We all have a fund of stories hidden in our families; this course will help us to access some of that powerful material. The workshop is open to all, from beginners to advanced writers looking to revise — we are all beginners when we face that blank page. We'll be reading some great and famous family pieces by others, such as Jeanette Wallis, Truman Capote, Naomi Shihab Nye, E.L. Doctorow and others. You're welcome to bring some pieces you are actively working on, and we'll also be generating new work all week long.
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 email up to 8 pages of prose to the Fine Arts Work Center by Friday, June 4, and bring 10 copies of the same piece to the first class meeting.
Oftentimes the idea that makes us begin a story is not at all what the story ends up being about. When we cling tenaciously to what we think we're writing about, our stories fail to surprise. Among other things, a writer must allow him or herself to let go of initial concepts and intuitions in order to allow the story to become what it will. How do we know when our "idea" for a story is driving it into the ground? How do we set loose our associative imagination in order to allow a story to discover itself? In this class we will look at our own stories to see if they are telling the tale they yearn to tell, and we'll experiment with the tools of structure, time, voice and narrative distance, in order to explore how elements of craft and form can be used to set a story free. Please bring one short story to class, along with enough copies to go around. Fiction handouts will be distributed in class and will be read and discussed during our week together.
This course will focus on writing essays and short stories that emanate from personal experience, as a means of exploring and illuminating greater social issues: religion, class, race, family, work, sexuality, illness, health, cultural identity and conflict—what Robert Coles has called "the literature of social reflection." In a workshop forum, we will work to improve your essays and stories, and bring them to a structurally complete, polished form. Please bring two finished essays or stories to the first class, as well as one by a published writer you admire.
In many of the greatest short stories— pieces like Chekhov's "The Lady With the Pet Dog," Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," William Trevor's "Lovers of Their Time" and Alice Munro's "Carried Away"—we are made to feel as if somehow the writer has managed to pack a novel into the compressed form of the short story. In this class we will look at the strategies that come into play when a writer attempts a story of novelistic scope, paying careful attention to such matters as point of view and narrative structure. Please read William Trevor's The Hill Bachelors and Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness. Other good writers to read are Richard Yates, Andre Dubus, Flannery O'Connor and, of course, Chekhov.
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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
Sarah Blake is the author of Full Turn, a chapbook
of poems, and the novels Grange House and The
Postmistress (Penguin, 2010). Her essays and
reviews have appeared in Good Housekeeping, US
News and World Report, and The Chicago Tribune.
She has taught seminars and workshops in literature
and in fiction at New York University, University of
Maryland, The George Washington University, The
Writer's Center, and at The Fine Arts Work Center.
BIOGRAPHY
Maria Flook, a 2007 Guggenheim Foundation
Fellow, is 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. Her fiction includes the novels Lux,
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 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
Nick Flynn's most recent book is The Ticking is
the Bomb (Norton, 2010), a memoir of deciding to
become a father while, or even though, his country is
engaged in two wars. His previous memoir, Another
Bullshit Night in Suck City, won the PEN/Martha
Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and has
been translated into thirteen languages. He is also
the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether which
won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and Blind
Huber. He has been awarded fellowships from the
Library of Congress, the Amy Lowell Trust, the Fine
Arts Work Center, and the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation. Some of the venues where his poems,
essays, and nonfiction have appeared include The
New Yorker, The Paris Review, National Public
Radio's "This American Life," and The New York
Times Book Review. He teaches one semester a
year at the University of Houston.
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, as well as I See You
Everywhere, a collection of linked stories. She
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 Muses,
Mentors, and Monsters: 30 Writers on the People
Who Changed Their Lives (edited by Elizabeth
Benedict). 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 & essays
have appeared in Yale's Theater magazine and
the Brooklyn Rail, 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
Robin Hemley is the author of eight books of
nonfiction and fiction, and the winner of many
awards including a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship,
The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction from The
Chicago Tribune, the Story Magazine Humor Prize,
an Independent Press Book Award, two Pushcart
Prizes and many others. He has been widely
anthologized and has published his work in such
places as The New York Times, The Believer, The
Southern Review, Orion, Ploughshares, Narrative.
com, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune,
and New York Magazine. His book about a purported
anthropological hoax in the Philippines will soon be
made into a feature film by the BBC. His most recent
books are Do-Over (Hachette, 2009) and Twirl/Run,
in collaboration with photographer Jeff Mermelstein
(Powerhouse Books, 2009). He is the founder and
organizer of NonfictioNOW, a biennial conference at
The University of Iowa, and directs The Nonfiction
Writing Program at The University of Iowa.
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, The Women's
Review of Books, Tikkun, Ms., ArchitectureBoston,
Agni, Ploughshares, in anthologies, and on NPR.
Awards include those from the Bunting Institute/
Harvard University, the L.L.Winship/Boston
Globe Foundation, the St. Botolph Foundation,
The Corporation of Yaddo, MacDowell, and the
Massachusetts Cultural Council. She teaches at
Tufts University and in Lesley University's lowresidency
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 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. She
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, and The MacDowell Colony. Her work has
appeared in McSweeney'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. She teaches in
the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University.
Her third novel, The Silver Girl, will be published by
Algonquin in 2010.
BIOGRAPHY
Christopher Keane is both a novelist and
screenwriter. His most recent book is Romancing
the A-List (Michael Wiese, 2008). He also authored
How to Write a Selling Screenplay (Random
House), and several novels based on his unusual
experiences. A year with the bounty hunter Ralph
Thorson inspired The Hunter (from which Chris's first
movie, a Paramount feature, was made). Six months
with the Barnum & Bailey Circus gave rise to The
Maximus Zone; a year with Manhattan's top call girl
madam produced Linda; four months in Iraq with the
Kurds prompted The Heir; and four months on the
professional golf circuit occasioned The Tour.
Peter Janney of Apllon Productions hired Chris to
write his most recent screenplay, Lost Light. His
television work includes: The Huntress (a major
TV series on USA), Dangerous Company (a WB
feature), and Mr. & Mrs. Bliss (ABC), among others.
He is currently writing a novel optioned by 20th
Century Fox, a psychological thriller with playwright
Talaya Delaney, and a comedy with screenwriter
Heather Bull. He has taught and/or lectured at
Emerson College, Harvard, The Smithsonian
Institution, the Ministre de Culture in Paris, Brown
University, and other places.
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 Black Monk (book, music,
lyrics); The Notebook; The Executioner's Daughter;
The Foggy Foggy Dew; The Last Bridge; I Love You, I
Love You Not; 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 Nouy 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. His new
book of poems then, we were still living will be out in
2010. He has been teaching at FAWC since 1995,
and was a Fine Arts Work Center Fellow in poetry
in 1990
BIOGRAPHY
James Lecesne has been telling stories for over
25 years. He 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 he wrote one of the
final episodes of Will & Grace. His novel Absolute
Brightness was published in 2008 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. More
recently he founded "After the Storm," a nonprofit
arts organization designed to benefit the youth of
New Orleans, and produced the film After the Storm.
He was recently commissioned to adapt Tennessee
Williams's novella The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
as a stage play for the Hartford Stage Company's
2010 Season.
BIOGRAPHY
Ariel Levy is a staff writer at The New Yorker
magazine, where she has written about the South
African runner Caster Semenya, the director Nora
Ephron, the fashion designer Marc Jacobs, and
Cindy McCain, the wife of Arizona senator and 2008
presidential candidate John McCain. Prior to joining
The New Yorker, she was a contributing editor at
New York magazine for twelve years. Her firstperson
piece "The Lesbian Bride's Handbook" was
anthologized in the Best American Essays of 2008.
She is also the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs.
She has appeared on The Colbert Report and Oprah
and lectures regularly at colleges around the country.
BIOGRAPHY
Alice Mattison's most recent novel, Nothing Is
Quite Forgotten In Brooklyn, was a finalist for the
Connecticut Book Award. 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 teaches fiction in the low residency
MFA program at Bennington College.
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
Howard Norman's most recent novel, What Is Left
The Daughter, will be published in July, 2010. He
has twice been a finalist for the National Book
Award, received a Lannan Award in literature, three
fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Arts, and the New England Book Award. His new
memoir, I Hate To Leave This Beautiful Place, will be
published in 2011 by HoughtonMifflinHarcourt. Two
years ago, sponsored by National Geographic, he
walked the "okunohosomiche" (Narrow Road to Far
North Towns), made famous by haiku master Matsuo
Basho. The travelogue of that journey will also be
published in 2011. He teaches in the MFA program at
the University of Maryland, and is on the faculty of the
Summer Writers Institute in Saratoga Springs.
BIOGRAPHY
Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S.
at the age of twenty. He has published a novel,
April Fool's Day (in a dozen languages), three story
collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust,
Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters) and two
collections of narrative essays. His work has been
anthologized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart
Prize collection, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has
received the Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim
fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts
fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an
American Book Award, and has been a writing
fellow of the New York Public Library. He teaches at
Concordia University in Montreal.
BIOGRAPHY
Pamela Painter is the author of two story collections,
Getting to Know the Weather, which won the GLCA
Award for First Fiction and was reprinted as a
Classic Contemporary by Carnegie Mellon, and
The Long and Short of It. She is also the co-author
of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers,
now in its third edition. Her stories have appeared
in The Atlantic, Harper's, Kenyon Review, Mid-
American Review, Ploughshares, and Quick Fiction,
among others and in numerous short short story
anthologies, such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction,
Flash Fiction Forward, MicroFiction Sudden Stories,
and You Have Time for This. She has received
grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation
and the National Endowment for the Arts, has won
three Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review's The John
Cheever Award for Fiction. Her stories have been
presented on stage by Word Theatre, Stage Turner,
and the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre. A recent
prize-winning story was recorded on a Norton CD
titled "Love Hurts." Her collection of short short
stories, Wouldn't You Like to Know, is forthcoming
from Carnegie Mellon in 2010. She teaches in
the Writing, Literature and Publishing Program at
Emerson College.
BIOGRAPHY
J. T. Rogers's recent plays include The Overwhelming
(Royal National Theatre, followed by UK tour and
BBC radio; Roundabout Theater, NYC); White
People (English Theater of Berlin; Off Broadway
commercial run); and Blood and Gifts (Tricycle
Theatre, London; upcoming US tour). His play
Madagascar is currently running at both the
Melbourne and Black Swan theater companies
in Australia, and he is writing new works for the
National and Lincoln Center Theaters. Rogers's
plays are published by Faber & Faber and
Dramatists Play Service. A member of New
Dramatists, he holds an honorary Doctorate of
Performing Arts from the University of North Carolina
School of the Arts.
BIOGRAPHY
Home Repair, Liz Rosenberg's first adult novel,
was a Target Breakout Selection for 2009. She has
published more than 25 award-winning books for
young readers, including two Young Adult novels,
and four prize-winning books of poems, most
recently Demon Love (Mammoth Books, 2008) and
The Lily Poems (Bright Hill Press, 2008). Her essays
and other work have appeared in The New Yorker,
The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's and elsewhere. She's
also served as advisory editor on two collections
of non-fiction: Total Immersion and Bread and
Fire. She won a Chancellor's Award for Excellence
in Undergraduate Teaching at the State University
of New York, held an NEH Chair at Colgate, and has
written a monthly book review column for The Boston
Globe for the past 20 years.
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, The House on Oyster Creek, is
forthcoming in June 2010.
BIOGRAPHY
Marisa Silver made her fiction debut in The New
Yorker when she was featured in that magazine's
first "Debut Fiction" issue. Her collection of short
stories, Babe in Paradise, was named a New York
Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los
Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. She is also
the author of the novels No Direction Home, and
The God of War, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times
Book Prize for fiction. Her latest collection of short
fiction, Alone with You, was published in April, 2010,
by Simon and Schuster. She is a winner of the O.
Henry Prize, and her work has been anthologized in
The Best American Short Stories as well as
other anthologies.
BIOGRAPHY
David Updike is the author of two collections of
short stories, Out on the Marsh, and most recently,
Old Girlfriends (St. Martin's Press, 2009). He is
also the author of six children's books, including A
Winter Journey, An Autumn Tale, A Spring Story,
and The Sounds of Summer. His stories and essays
have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's,
DoubleTake, and The Utne Reader among others.
A Young Adult novel, Ivy's Turn, was published
in 2005. He currently teaches English at Roxbury
Community College in Boston.
BIOGRAPHY
Steve Yarbrough is the author of five novels,
including The Oxygen Man, winner of the California
Book Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and
Letters Award for Fiction, and the Mississippi
Authors Award; Visible Spirits; Prisoners of War, a
finalist for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award; The End
of California, a finalist for the Mississippi Institute of
Arts and Letters Award for fiction; and most recently,
Safe from the Neighbors (Knopf, 2010). He also
authored the story collections Veneer (University
of Missouri Press, 1998), Mississippi History,
and Family Men. His work has appeared in Best
American Short Stories, Best American Mystery
Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He
currently teaches at Emerson College.
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