Emrys Writing Room: October Workshops

The Writing Room offers a variety of affordable, cost- effective workshops for writers of all levels. The goal is to provide quality learning through a balance of craft discussions, writing exercises and feedback from professionally published writers who also have teaching experience. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To sign-up, go to www.emrys.org under Programs/Writing Room.

Upcoming Workshops: October 2016

Description: As any aspiring author will tell you, the first fifty pages of a novel are make-or-breakers. If you cannot hook a reader/agent/editor with your compelling character, your cliff-hanging plot, your exotic locale before they get to page fifty—or so the saying goes—they will immediately upon turning to page fifty-one fling your manuscript into the fire and use the ashes as fertilizer for their strawberry beds. To some extent—minus flames and strawberries—this is a truism of the professional market; HOWEVER, there is a much more important person than an agent, an editor, or even a reader who has to be hooked by page fifty. That is: the author.

Over the course of these classes, we will either write, or, if you already have a manuscript started, edit and analyze the first fifty pages of your next novel. Paying special attention to the development of themes and motifs, the character driven plot and the function of your chosen form, by the end of the four weeks we will aim at having fifty pages capable of sustaining the drive of the rest of the book as you write it and catching your reader’s imagination as they sit down to read.

Bio: Sarah Blackman has been the Director of Creative Writing at the Fine Arts Center since 2008. She is the co-fiction editor of DIAGRAM, the online magazine of experimental fiction, poetry and schematics, and the founding editor of Crashtest, an arts and literary magazine for high school age teens. Her poetry and fiction has been published or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Oxford American, the Missouri Review, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review and The Georgia Review, among other journals, and has been anthologized in Poets Against the War Anthology, Best New American Voices, 2006, Metawritings; Toward a Theory of Nonfiction, and xoOrpheus: Fifty New Myths which was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2014. Her short story collection Mother Box and Other Tales was the winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award in 2012 and was published by Fc2 in 2013. Her novel, HEX, was published by the same press in 2016.

Nikky Finney, Ada Limón, Ellen Bryant Voigt.

Daisy Fried, Airea D. Matthews, Carrie Fountain, Matthea Harvey.

Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angel Nafis.

Janice N. Harrington, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Wisława Szymborska, Elizabeth Bishop.

Tracy K. Smith, Safia Elhillo.

Mary Oliver, Sandra Simonds, Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

Natalie Diaz, Carolyn Forché, Sharon Olds:

We might easily refer to them as women poets. The term, after all, is correct. But it’s also one that has historically implied a singularity to the feminine experience, a solitary allotted table at the art-party around which all ladies might gather. In our four-week course we will traverse the work of these writers in order to appreciate a wider range of voice, perspective: witness, pop-culturalist, musician, activist, cartographer, academic, mother, horticulturalist, comic, daughter, director, survivor. Utilizing the lenses of various perspectives will sophisticate our views regarding craft, communication, what we intend to say and do, change and preserve, in our art and environments. Students participate in workshop and will complete a small portfolio of 4-6 polished poems.

Bio: Mamie Morgan completed her BA in English and Religious Studies from Wofford College and received her MFA in Poetry from UNC Wilmington. Her work has appeared in Smartish Pace, Oxford American, Cimarron, Carolina Quarterly, Inkwell, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. 2016 marks her eleventh year teaching poetry at South Carolina’s Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. She can most often be found at the mercy of her only child, a pitbull named Henrietta Modine.