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Craft Workshops
BUILDING A BETTER STORY
Exploring the Practice and Process of Revision
Instructors: Toni Amato and Audrey Beth Stein
Are you stuck on a particular
story? Want to examine or re-examine how some of the fundamentals
of writing craft can help your writing? Seeking a
serious workshop that encourages both experimentation and
revision? This ten-week workshop will use in-depth class
discussions, facilitated peer critique, in-class and take-home
exercises, and readings to explore various elements of fiction craft
with a focus on the practice and process of revision. Using
readings and exercises from Josip Novakovich's Fiction Writers
Workshop and Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter’s What If? Writing
Exercises for Fiction Writers, participants will be writing and
revising every week, experimenting with various techniques and
developing and strengthening their revision habits and strategies. At
the end of the workshop, you'll leave with either a first draft of a
new story or a revision of one you started before class.
Topics
will include:
sources of fiction, voice, setting, character, plot, point of view,
dialogue and scene, beginnings and endings, description and word choice.
Class size limited to 8 to insure the quality of the class.
Writing sample or instructor permission required.
DIGGIN’ UP BONES
How to write the difficult, dangerous and necessary stories
Instructors: Toni Amato and Kristie Helms
Intensive and personalized class designed to
provide writers with the equipment and courage to unearth the stories
that scare them, inspire them and make them fear their mother’s wrath.
DIRT BAG LOVER STORIES
Writing about life after the U-Haul
Instructors: Toni Amato
They said you'd grow old together. Instead, they stole your CD
player and left you with the cable bill. Now you're bitter, sad,
depressed and Valentine's Day is just around the corner. Love
stinks - so write about it. Join us for a two-session workshop on
the rough side of romance: the knockdown drag out of finding them in
bed
with your best friend, cleaning out your bank account, and talking
trash about you to all your friends. Heck, we never knew why you dated
them anyway. Leave the romance novels and love songs at home 'cuz
we are taking the gloves off.
The workshop will be designed to
encourage writers to first tell the tale, and then, through homework
and in-class critique, polish it into the best revenge…something to be
published.
RIGHT WORK, WRITE WORK
A creative writing workshop for people involved in social justice and human service work
Instructors: Toni Amato and Meg
Stone
Activism and direct care work can be inspiring, challenging and
uplifting as well as frustrating and confusing. Those of us who
work in these fields need to both create and have at our disposal the
chronicles, commentaries and insights of others, both as a point of
reference and advice and also as historic documentation.
This workshop will provide the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of what we do and present it in a creative and literary manner. Through in-class writing prompts and personalized homework, participants will be invited and encouraged to share their wisdom and experience. All levels of writing experience are welcome.
WRITE BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM
How to write about “home”
Instructors: Toni Amato and Mary Davies
Intensive and personalized class designed to assist writers in
discovering and narrating the stories of their origins, inspirations
and history.
Working from a pre-submitted 15-25
page manuscript from EACH writer, Amato and Davies will design
personalized in-class prompts as well as homework, geared toward
deepening each piece and focusing its central idea.
The class will also be using personally-targeted and chosen works by
published authors as a way to study craft and approach.