Four-day Workshop:
Four-day Workshop:
Meets daily: Wednesday, May 7 – Saturday, May 10, 9 a.m. - Noon
Meets daily: Wednesday, May 7 – Saturday, May 10, 9 a.m. - Noon
Nonfiction and the Craft of Storytelling with Amy Stewart
Creating Fictional Art with Robert Olen Butler
The best nonfiction reads like a novel. Even when we're reporting the facts, our writing is stronger when we understand how characters, conflict, drama, plot, and setting come together to create a story. This class borrows storytelling techniques from novelists and applies them to memoir, creative nonfiction, reported journalism, history, and other forms. We'll study examples tailored to the participants' projects and do in-class exercises to help shape their work into a compelling narrative. Please submit a one-page synopsis of a current writing project by email to Nicole Swift at nswift@mdc.edu no later than April 21.
Amy Stewart is the award-winning author of six books on the perils and pleasures of the natural world, including four New York Times bestsellers, The Drunken Botanist, Wicked Bugs, Wicked Plants, and Flower Confidential. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other newspapers and magazines, and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the American Horticulture Society’s Book Award.
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The workshop will focus on the creative process for beginning or advanced writers. We will address such issues as what is art; what is distinctive about the way the artist addresses the world, the inner self, and the objects to be created; and what are the essential characteristics of fiction. These essentials are best explored — especially in short workshops — by my proposing an aesthetic theory of the short short story, both as a distinct art form and as a paradigm for the crucial beginning pages of any effective work of fiction. During the workshop, the students will write exclusively in the short short form. Students must read my book, From Where You Dream, before the workshop. I will administer writing exercises to spur students’ daily output. The goal is to lead the students into the depths of their artistic unconscious and illuminate the intrinsic nature of narrative.
Robert Olen Butler has published fourteen novels and six volumes of short fiction, one of which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He is the 2013 recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. Among his many other accolades are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and two National Magazine Awards in Fiction.