with Sheila Bender
November 6-9, 2014
Fort Worden State Park, Port Townsend WA
Register online for the Autumn Creative Nonfiction Workshop

We write memoir and other forms of creative nonfiction to explore meaning in our human experiences and observations. To do this and gain insight, we must not only relive our experiences as we write them, but shape these experiences for the page. What to include? What to leave out? Where to start and where to end? There are tricks of the trade that help writers find shapes for writing toward insight and holding surprises for themselves and for their readers (remember Robert Frost said, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”) Together, we’ll experiment with and evaluate many strategies for generating and shaping work in ways that help us arrive at the deepest and most vivid levels of our writing  (as Emily Dickinson famously advises if we want to find and tell the truth, we must “come at things slant”). Join us for starting new work, getting unstuck on older work and for gaining the skills needed to revise toward insight.

SHEILA BENDER

Sheila Bender’s newest works are A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, a memoir about the months after her son’s sudden death, and Behind Us the Way Grows Wider, a collection of poetry. Her latest instructional books for writers are Creative Writing DeMystified and Writing and Publishing the Personal Essay.

She teaches around the country at centers and programs for the literary arts.

SCHEDULE

Thursday, November 6, 2014

• 7-7:30 p.m. Meet and Greet
• 7:30-8:30 p.m. Let’s get started: We’ll talk about our individual writing goals and do several quick writing exericses to get warmed up.

Friday, November 7, 2014

• 9-10:15 a.m. Craft lecture and prompts on using proven strategies from successful memoir and creative nonfiction: the letter form, the persona form, third-person writing, and interviews.
• 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m. Creating successful scenes and voice. In-class generative writing from prompts for generating vivid scenes and a clear, evocative voice.
• Writing time and individual 1/2 hour consultations
• 7:30-9 p.m. Works-in-progress reading – 7 minutes per reader; half the class each evening. Bring something you’d like the group to hear.

Saturday, November 8, 2014

• 9-10:15 a.m. Craft lecture and discussion: The practice of the lyric essay and how it can help in all of creative nonfiction writing
• 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m. In-class writing prompts for using lyric strategies (lists, litany and anaphora, among others) in any writing
• Writing time and individual 1/2 hour consultations
• 7:30-9 p.m. Works-in-progress reading – 7 minutes per reader; half the class each evening. Bring something you’d like the group to hear.

Sunday, November 9, 2014

• 9-9:45AM Farewell Session – Discussion on how to sustain writing momentum