Work with award-winning poet Edward Vidaurre to dismantle the obstacles that stop your creative process. By welcoming pain and allowing the beauty of the same pain to flow in your writing, you will learn to write without reserve. In week two, we will focus on practical aspects of the poetry publishing process.
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.
Welcome to the world of Noir, where the streets are dark with something more than night. Join us for a literary joyride through Texas and the West, down Park Avenue, and into the frigid Nordic landscape, a journey where the desperate and duplicitous encounter corruption, betrayal, and death - and no one comes out unscathed. Explore four timeless hardboiled classics: Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, which started it all; Laura, The Getaway, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
