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Igniting the Story in Your Writing Process: A 2-Day Bootcamp with New York Times Bestselling Author Andre Dubus III
June 19, 2021 @ 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm CDT
$175Sat-Sun, June 19 & 20, 1-3pm
Offered via Zoom
Cost: Nonmembers $175, Members $150, Students $75
Contact Joshua Cantú, registrar, for class availability at 210-734-9673 ext 1009, or joshua@geminiink.org.
If I teach nothing in my writing classes, I teach this: do not outline your memoir (or novel or novella or short story or essay). Do not think out the plot, the narrative arc, the protagonist’s journey, whatever you want to call it. Instead, try to find the story through an honest excavation of the characters’ total experience of the situation at hand. Do that, and I promise the story will begin to write itself, with little help from the godly, intelligent, well-read, and ambitious author. But how, precisely, does one go about this “excavation”? And how, technically speaking, can we ignite a story into “writing itself”? Come to this workshop, and I will seek to demystify those writerly tools and skills that time and time again, if they are sharp enough, and if the writer can summon enough daily faith and nerve, can penetrate the mystery of story itself.
Andre Dubus III’s seven books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His most recent novel, Gone So Long, has received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal and has been named on many “Best Books” lists, including selection for The Boston Globe’s “Twenty Best Books of 2018” and “The Best Books of 2018,” “Top 100,” Amazon.
Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches full-time at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Fontaine, a modern dancer, and their three children.