Master Classes
ALL MASTER CLASSES ARE NOW FULL.
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Creative Nonfiction Master Class: Shaping Life into Art: The Structure of Creative Nonfiction with James Tate Hill [CLASS FULL]
Brian Doyle described the essay as a true story made into art. The true stories we all have, but how do we shape those experiences into work an audience would find compelling? This class will examine a variety of ways this can be done. Whether you’re working on essays or a memoir, the most difficult questions often involve where to begin, what to include, what to leave out, and how to keep readers interested. By examining formal structures, point of view, voice, tone, and other stylistic choices made by leading essayists and memoirists, this course will help you hone the tools to translate life experience into expressions of art.
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: Radical Revision: Re-Seeing Your Story with Xhenet Aliu [CLASS FULL]
Look at the word revision. No, really look at it. The root words don’t translate to tidy up, or make cleaner, or re-order some scenes so that the conflict arises closer to the introduction of the story.
No, revision means re-vision. To see all over again.
In this master class, we’re going to re-envision our next drafts with the same exploratory tenacity we applied to our first. We’re going to call this process “Radical Revision,” and it will involve engaging in a series of exercises that will ask you to temporarily abandon the narrative roadmaps you’ve already laid out and instead investigate the byways that surround it. In the latter half of the class, we’ll suss through the opportunities you found and discuss how you might directly or indirectly integrate your unexpected discoveries into what we might call a “functional revision”–that is, a more conventional “next draft” of the pieces you’ve been working on.
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.
Poetry Master Class: Writing by Ear (Beyond Rhyme) with Timothy O’Keefe [CLASS FULL]
When I ask my freshman literature students how they know a text is a poem, their most common response is, “It rhymes.” And who can blame them? So many of our early experiences with language include songs, jingles, nursery rhymes, tales, verbal games, children’s verse — forms that showcase the felicitous sounds and patterns that words can make. This sets the stage for a paradox that many aspiring poets eventually encounter: the quality that fueled their initial curiosity and joy in language (rhyming) is not only absent in most contemporary poems, but often discouraged and derided in workshop settings. This class is not a defense of end rhymes or traditional prosody. Instead, it will focus on sonic moves, patterns, and strategies that not only recapture the linguistic play we enjoyed so many years ago, but help our poems mean more because of the sounds they do (or don’t) make.
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.