Course Descriptions
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Focusing on Form when Revising Creative Nonfiction with Cassandra Kircher
This workshop explores ways in which attention to the form or shape of creative nonfiction not only helps writers reimagine what they’re writing about but also reinforces what they want their work to say. During our time together, we’ll experiment with what I call the narrative, focused, disjunctive, and lyrical forms to better understand our writing strengths and preferences and to move what we’ve been working on closer to completion.
Manuscript Guidelines
Please submit up to 1500 words from a single piece or two pieces of approximately 700 words each, along with your current CV in a separate attachment, on the same day you register for the Squire Summer Writing Workshops. Submissions should be saved in a single MS Word document, using double-spaced, 12-point, Times New Roman font, with numbered pages, and sent as an attachment to masterclass@ncwriters.org. The title and your name should appear on the submission. The sample you submit will be the work discussed in class, and accepted registrants will be asked to circulate their drafts to others in the class prior to the conference.
Each registrant should be ready to handle the intensive instruction and atmosphere of this workshop.
Choice and Consequence in Fiction with Sheryl Monks
Kurt Vonnegut told us that a character must want something, even if it’s only a glass of water. Such desires compel characters to action, which drives narrative momentum. A story well told involves characters faced with decisions, and the outcome depends on the choices they make. In this workshop, we will examine how conflict is shaped by the choices, or lack of choices, characters make and the consequences that unfold as a result. Participants can expect to have their characters’ choices thoughtfully and respectfully scrutinized by their peers to help achieve narrative tension that immerses readers in a story that resonates deeply and lingers long after it ends.
Manuscript Guidelines
Please submit the first 1,500 sequential words from a single work, along with your current CV in a separate attachment, on the same day you register for the Squire Summer Writing Workshops. Submissions should be saved in a single MS Word document, using double-spaced, 12-point, Times New Roman font, with numbered pages, and sent as an attachment to masterclass@ncwriters.org. The title and your name should appear on the submission. The sample you submit will be the work discussed in class, and accepted registrants will be asked to circulate their drafts to others in the class prior to the conference.
Each registrant should be ready to handle the intensive instruction and atmosphere of this workshop.
Figuring: Making (and Unmaking and Remaking) a Poem with Joseph Mills
In this course, we’ll explore various aspects of “figuring” in writing poetry. What, as Robert Frost says, is the figure a poem makes? How do we write poetry to figure things out? How do we think about a poem’s configurations? What calculations do we make? What are we considering? What are a poem’s figures – both words and numbers, body and design and importance? What does it look like? What does it add up to? What are its implications? When we complete a draft, do we step back and think “that figures”? If we do, what do we mean?
This course involves serious play. We will be working with both your submitted poems (so please don’t submit anything that you won’t at least consider changing) and new material that we will generate in class.
Manuscript Guidelines
Please submit three poems, in a total of no more than three pages, along with your current CV in a separate attachment, on the same day you register for the Squire Summer Writing Workshops. Poems should be saved in a single MS Word document, using single-spaced, 12-point, Times New Roman font, and sent as an attachment to masterclass@ncwriters.org. Your name and the title of each poem should appear on the submission. The sample you submit will be the work discussed in class, and accepted registrants will be asked to circulate their drafts to others in the class prior to the conference.
Each registrant should be ready to handle the intensive instruction and atmosphere of this workshop.