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CLASS DESCRIPTIONS
Faculty Workshops meet for two hours every day (except one free day) in groups of seven writers. Workshops are open to participants, but not free agents.
Publishing and Polishing Your Nonfiction Prose, by Laura Fraser
Do you want to build a publication history as a step up in your writing career? Maybe you have ideas you’d like to learn to shape into a magazine piece, or perhaps you envision a career as a freelance writer while you work nights on the great American novel? This workshop will explore ways to catapult your polished prose off your computer and into print.
Laura Fraser will be your guide throughout the week, and will teach the secrets of writing and selling great magazine articles.
Whether you’re writing profiles, travel, science and medicine, personal essay, or reported features, Laura will discuss how to pitch and target magazines that require you to fit their style—without losing your voice or sense of purpose.
With her, you’ll dissect award-winning magazine articles to see what make them work, and will workshop students’ pieces to help pare out the clutter, reorganize, and bring the piece to life.
Kate Gale will lead a session on the best approaches to editors of literary magazines and of large and small presses.
The next by-line may be yours!
Crafting our Stories into Memoir, by Meredith Hall
Why do I remember my grandmother’s hands peeling a ripe peach for me one summer morning? The sound of my mother’s high heels clicking on the wooden floors? Our memories are carried as images, snapshots of “obsessive moments” we store and then circle and mine for meaning.
Like poets, memoirists locate and plumb sensory images for language and meaning.
And like fiction writers, we use the craft of narrative writing—scene, setting, character and dialogue—to develop tension and immediacy.
In this workshop, we will explore and practice the tools memoirists use to draw from memory the stories that are waiting, working beyond the events themselves toward a larger understanding we can deliver to our readers.
Before the retreat, you will send up to twelve pages of memoir or narrative nonfiction that is in draft form, work you will continue to work on in workshop.
We will also do short in- and out-of-class exercises.
You will leave the retreat with a second draft and a folio of prompts for future writing.
Bete Noire: The Poem You Can't Seem to Finish, by Dana Levin
Bete noire: all of us have poems that seem to resist our furthering efforts.
We'll discuss poetic resistance, ways of working around that resistance, and give fresh eyes a chance to help each of us move forward with our recalcitrant poem.
Each participant is encouraged to bring in his or her most resistant, messy, half-baked poem (If you'll allow me an extended metaphor here: I'm not looking for raw dough as much as a cake that hasn't baked enough: perhaps we can see the outlines of it, but it's still pretty gooey in the center.
Does it need a different temperature? A different kind of pan? Is it missing some ingredients that are keeping it from jelling? What might be the solutions to these problems? etc.).
Before the AROHO retreat begins, participants will be instructed how and where to send their critique poem, as well as (ideally) 3 drafts of their poetic bete noire: an early "raw" draft, a middle one and the most recent one.
Each participant should include a one-page description sheet that details the poem's original intent/inspiration, the areas of it that seem most resistant (if you can identify them), and anything else you might want to say to help us get oriented.
Hearing The Voices, by Ellen McLaughlin
The multiple perspectives and aspects of self within each of us are an abundant source of material for any writer.
In this workshop, writers will be encouraged to explore the many characters they call upon within themselves for inspiration and direction.
The premise is that a writer is freed when her sense of human character is less fixed and more varied than we have otherwise been taught.
This workshop is guided from playwright's perspective, in that playwrights are constantly dealing with the challenge of creating multiple voices in dialogue, all of which must be equally compelling and authentic.
Letting the voices speak and claiming all of them as our own is not only fundamental to the craft of writing, but essential to any reckoning with the self.
Open to all writers.
Moments, What Ifs, and the Telling Detail: Writing the Short Short Story, by Pamela Painter
Our lives are made up of many small moments, brief “what if” imaginings, and fleeting observations, some of which seem destined to expand into a longer story, to become part of a larger tale.
And then there are those moments that remain just what they are—these are the moments that lend themselves to the short short story.
This workshop will stay with the moment by focusing on the short short story form—stories that range from 250 to 500 words.
During the retreat we’ll be writing a one-sentence story, a “he said/she said” story, a “list” story, and many more, often using a story from the great short-short anthologies, Sudden Fiction, MicroFiction, Flash Fiction, or Flash Fiction Forward as a “model.” In this workshop, you will also learn how to create your own “exercises” for writing the next twenty short shorts after this AROHO retreat ends.
Everyone—yes, everyone will leave this workshop with new, publishable stories, and an acquired addiction for the short short story form.
Faculty Classes are lectures and discussions designed for larger groups, and they may be attended by both participants and free agents.
"It's In Your Pause", by Mary Rose Betten
You've polished your words on paper, but when you stand at the microphone, how do you present the spirit of your work aloud? How well do your words travel to the ear of your listener? In this workshop, led by a professional Hollywood/New York actress and playwright, we'll cover the seven basic points of reading aloud and then practice our reading in a group setting.
You'll receive personal critique and learn from observing others being critiqued. You'll come away from the class with specific written advice and the ability to read your prose in a captivating voice, a skill that will last a lifetime.
Finding a Bear in Manhattan, by Kate Gale
That's how most people feel about finding a book publisher...
Difficult.
Impossible.
Even if you find the bear it will be caged up and you won't get close enough to talk to it.
There are steps that you, the writer can take that will get your manuscript read by editors.
That's what we're going to talk about.
Getting your manuscript out of the slush pile and into the right editor's hands.
I am: Sylvia Plath, Poetic Form and the Creation of Self, by Dana Levin
“I am becoming another,” the Maenad says in an early Plath poem.
The operations of becoming, of figuring into being, are central to Plath’s work.
In this class, we will examine how her use of simile, metaphor and the simple declarative sentence drive both the development of her poetic style and the development of her self-identity, as well as the wonders and dangers of conflating the birth of style with the actual death, and rebirth, of self.
A twenty minute (tops) lecture will precede lively discussion.
Handouts of Plath poems will be provided.
Exploring Memory: Techniques for Mining the Past, by Meredith Hall
How do writers locate and recapture those “moments” that have shaped us? How do we discover which stories matter, and how they matter? In several guided exercises, we will create a brief writer’s notebook, a reservoir for future writing.
Writing Beyond Your Senses, by Mary Johnson
"Write through your senses" is often good advice.
But what does a writer do when the people she writes about or the characters she invents have experiences which seem to transcend the senses? We'll explore several examples from religious texts, ghost stories, classical literature, modern short stories and memoir, and science fiction.
After discussing strategies, we'll do some writing of our own.
Suitable for writers of poetry or prose, fiction, or nonfiction.
Subtext: Lies and Secrets, by Ellen McLaughlin
Playwrights are fascinated by what their characters aren't saying, which is what informs and drives any scene.
In order to write a vivid scene, every playwright has to understand the subtext that lurks beneath the surface of the dialogue.
The same technique applies to fiction and creative nonfiction.
In this workshop, we'll explore this fundamental principle of dialogue and practice creating subtext in our own scenes.
The Double Ending, by Pamela Painter
Have you ever completed a story, revised it several times, but you still have a nagging suspicion that the ending is not the final word on your character’s fate? Perhaps the ending, while true to the arc of the story, leaves your character (and the reader) in dire straits and an untenable situation.
Or perhaps the ending has reached a happy resolution, but given the nature of your character, you know it will not last.
So, although the ending might seem to be a satisfactory one, somehow you know there is more to the story—but at a future time beyond your story’s current ending.
This dilemma—the suspicion that there is more, or the need for more-- calls for the solution of the double ending.
It isn’t that the first ending is wrong, but rather that it is not quite the whole story, even though it is a necessary steppingstone on the way to the “final, brief and second” ending.
In this class, we will explore the art of the double ending.
If possible, bring a “completed” story, or piece, or poem to see if the “end” is really the end.
Retreat Panels
Keynote Panel: “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
These words appear in Virginia Woolf’s essay, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf’s controversial, feminist response to the Spanish Civil War and fascism in Italy and Germany. The essay is a hypothetical response to a request for a contribution towards the “Society for the Justice, Equality and Liberty of all men and women.” Meredith Hall, Dana Levin, Pamela Painter, and Ellen McLaughlin will give brief responses to the quote and invite discussion from the audience.
Grant Money: Where to Find it, How to Get it
Four veterans of the grant process—Darlene Chandler Bassett, Mary Johnson, Summer Wood, and Kim Ponders—will tell their battle tales and get you fitted and armored for your own quest for the Holy Grail of Funding.
Get Published!
Editor Kate Gale, literary agent Sally van Haitsma, and freelance writer Laura Fraser join together to share their stories of trial and error, crash-and-burn and success, and offer suggestions for how you can polish and present your next query, proposal, or story.
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Daily Schedule
May change slightly with special events, but this is a typical day. Get some sleep before you arrive. You’ll need it!
7:30 - breakfast
8:30 - first class lecture/discussion with faculty
10:15 - second class lecture/discussion with faculty
12:00 - lunch
1:00 - seven person workshops with faculty member
4:00 - publishing/grant- writing/funding panel discussion with faculty
5:30 - dinner
7:00 - social hour and readings with faculty or special guest
9:00 - open mike participant readings
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