Fall Conference 2006

Master Classes: Fall Conference 2006

Saturday, November 11, 2:00-4:30 pm

Master Classes offer intermediate and advanced writers a chance to delve more deeply into a particular genre. The Master Classes are a half hour longer than other Session III classes and limited to 15 students.

Participants are admitted on the strength of a writing sample submitted in advance of the conference. While publication credits are not required, you should submit a brief cover letter summarizing your writing background and highlighting publication credits if applicable.

An additional nonrefundable processing fee of $25 must be included with submission.

Submission Guidelines for Each Genre

When you register for Master Class, please choose a Session III class as a back-up in case you are not admitted to the Master Class.

• Fiction. Submit a cover letter and no more than 10 double-spaced pages of fiction, 12-point type (short story or novel excerpt). Mail 2 hard copies to NCWN Fiction Master Class, PO Box 954, Carrboro, NC 27510.
  
  
• Non-Fiction. Submit a cover letter and no more than 10 double-spaced pages of nonfiction, 12-point type (essay or excerpt). Mail 2 hard copies to NCWN Nonfiction Master Class, PO Box 954, Carrboro, NC 27510.
  
  
• Poetry. Submit a cover letter and no more than 5 single-spaced pages of poetry, 12-point type. Mail 2 hard copies to NCWN Poetry Master Class, PO Box 954, Carrboro, NC 27510.
  
  

Two weeks before the conference, you will be notified about your enrollment status.

Available Classes

CREATIVE NONFICTION MASTER CLASS - Re-imagining The Real, with Joseph Bathanti
This session will employ creative nonfiction (personal essay, memoir, etc.) strategies of uncovering and discovering the elusive ephemeral abstract known as "truth." We'll attempt to explore honestly the way we see things outside ourselves in relationship to ourselves. "Honesty" is a term that can be particularly idiosyncratic as it relates to creative nonfiction, but it is absolutely crucial. Even as words begin to mark the page, the work itself is being transformed through imagination and becomes something outside the experience that prompted it. This session will examine the challenges of writing autobiographically and walking the tightrope between what is "real" to the writing and that which is "real" to the experience that spawned it. Special attention will be focused on beginnings, points of entry that lure readers into the work.

FICTION MASTER CLASS - Short Story: Eye-Opening Openings, with Ruth Moose
They say that to get a mule's attention you have to hit it first between the eyes with a two-by-four. Same goes for editors (metaphorically speaking, of course). Serious editors read the entire first page of a short story. Good editors read the first paragraph. A lot of editors read only the first sentence. As writers we have only a line, a paragraph, a page to hook a reader. In this workshop we'll look at examples that work, discuss why they work, what makes them work, then write and workshop openings of our own.

FICTION/CREATIVE NONFICTION MASTER CLASS - Keeping Writing Powerful, with Sean Murphy
To paraphrase Franz Kafka, "Literature should be an axe to break the frozen sea inside us." It is this revolutionary quality, the capacity for a piece of writing to set the world on its ear, to open new dimensions of possibility, that brings many of us to writing in the first place. How do we keep this sense of the miraculous alive as we settle down to the work of producing vibrant, fresh works of fiction? How do we keep the process new and exciting and the "sea inside us" unfrozen as we pick up the pen or go back to the keyboard again and again? In this workshop we'll examine the many dimensions of possibility that open up to us in the creation of fiction and creative nonfiction, and try to rediscover the sense of largeness that excited us about literature in the first place.

POETRY MASTER CLASS - Poetcraft, with John Balaban