Master Classes
Master Classes offer advanced writers a chance to delve more deeply into a particular genre. Each Master Class will take place over the course of Sessions I and II, and each will be limited to the first 10 qualified registrants.
While publication credits are not required, Master Class participants should be experienced writers, dedicated to their craft, with at least some experience in workshop settings. Applications will be reviewed, and qualified registrants admitted, on a rolling basis, until the Master Class is full or the deadline of Monday, April 6, whichever comes first.
Please submit your current CV, along with the required manuscript (see each Master Class’s course description, below, for its manuscript requirements), to masterclass@ncwriters.org, on the day you register for the Spring Conference. You cannot be considered for a Master Class until we receive your CV and required manuscript. Again, the deadline to apply for a Master Class is Monday, April 6, but Master Classes may fill before then.
When you register for the Spring Conference, if applying for a Master Class, please choose another workshop as a backup for each session, in case you are not admitted to the Master Class. Application to a Master Class requires a non-refundable $20 processing fee, in addition to the Spring Conference registration fee. If registering for the conference online or by phone, you can pay this processing fee with a VISA, MasterCard, or Discover. If registering by mail, you must include a separate check for $20.
Creative Nonfiction Master Class: The Relentless Possibilities with M. Randal O’Wain (FULL)
To be an essayist and memoirist is an act of observation that goes beyond writing. We are collectors, archivists, and engaged witnesses. “Each person who is a student of writing is a student of life,” says Tom Spanbauer. But in this wide-reaching genre of creative nonfiction the magic ultimately happens on the sentence level and less, as fictional plots do, in the structural shape of a story. As it is with poetry, the line communicates something particular and essential about the writer herself. The line, or sentence, is the way we show ourselves as precisely human within the events of our true and shared stories.
In his book on syntax, Verlyn Klinkenborg says, “A writer’s real work is the endless winnowing of sentences. The relentless exploration of possibilities. The effort, over and over again, to see in what you started to say the possibility of saying something you didn’t know you could.”
I agree. In this Master Class, I am asking writers to read the submitted work beforehand, but I aim to spend our time together moving line-by-line through your creative work so that we may prioritize how the first line moves into the next, and so on. In this way we can attend to how sentences enliven stories.
Please submit up to 1,500 sequential words from a single work, along with your current CV in a separate attachment, on the same day that you register for the conference. Submissions should be saved in an MS Word document, using double-spaced 12-point Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman font, with numbered pages, and sent as an attachment to masterclass@ncwriters.org. The Word document’s file name should include your own last name, and the title of the work and your name should appear on the submission itself. If accepted into the Master Class, your submitted work will be shared with other Master Class registrants.
Each registrant should be ready to handle the intensive instruction and atmosphere of the Master Class.
Fiction Master Class: True North: Finding Your Fiction’s Center with Travis Mulhauser (FULL)
This course will center on student fiction. We will explore your submitted work, identify strengths, and brainstorm solutions. Instruction will include specific elements of craft—including setting, dialogue, style, and character—but the driver of the discussion will be how those elements apply to your work. Students will leave this course with a concrete plan for how to push their stories forward, and more importantly, how their fiction can continue to evolve post class. This will be a dynamic, two-session experience that will pay dividends well beyond the weekend.
Please submit up to 1,500 sequential words from a single work, along with your current CV in a separate attachment, on the same day that you register for the conference. Submissions should be saved in an MS Word document, using double-spaced 12-point Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman font, with numbered pages, and sent as an attachment to masterclass@ncwriters.org. The Word document’s file name should include your own last name, and the title of the work and your name should appear on the submission itself. If accepted into the Master Class, your submitted work will be shared with other Master Class registrants.
Each registrant should be ready to handle the intensive instruction and atmosphere of the Master Class.
Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Master Class: Thresholds with Sarah Rose Nordgren (FULL)
In these uncertain times, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with information, emotion, anxiety, and questions about how to live and be in the world. Given this, how might poetry be a place of opening, of receptivity, and flow between? In this workshop, we will focus on poetry that meets the bewildered world with both bravery and softness, equally prepared to accept and to transform.As Jane Hirshfield says of her own process, “I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.”
This course is part workshop, part craft class, part friends gathered around a fire. We will talk about some different approaches to thresholds—possibility, risk, betweenness, choice, transformation—read poems poised on various thresholds, and spend most of the time discussing your own poems. My goal is to facilitate a space of inquiry, support, and trust in which we can pursue beauty, kinship, and ways to approach our poetry in the complex times in which we find ourselves.
Please submit three poems, totaling no more than five pages, on the same day that you register for the conference, along with your current CV in a separate attachment. Poems should be saved in a single MS Word document, using single-spaced, 12-point, Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman font, and sent as an attachment to masterclass@ncwriters.org. The Word document’s file name should include your own last name, and your name and the title of each poem should appear on the submission. If accepted into the Master Class, your submitted work will be shared with other Master Class registrants. Each registrant should be ready to handle the intensive instruction and atmosphere of the Master Class.