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| Tinker Mt. Writers Conference Workshop |
Roanoke, VA.
Friday Reflections Special
offers information on
Summer Writers Workshops one each Friday for a month.
2013 Workshop Dates: June 9 -14,
2013
Want to be a writer who makes people
think, ponder, and listen? Then this is the place for you. The Tinker Mountain
Writers' Workshop is your opportunity to develop the writing skills you've
always wanted in a one-week experience at Hollins University. Nestled in the
foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, you'll be surrounded by peace, beauty,
and inspiration as you discover your full potential as a creative writer.
Choose one from nine workshops in fiction, creative nonfiction, screenwriting,
and poetry — led by a remarkably talented faculty. With class sizes of no more
than 12 students, you'll benefit from one-on-one interaction with your workshop
leader along with in-depth class discussions. You can expect faculty and
student readings, manuscript reviews, craft seminars, and a variety of other
activities developed specifically for your workshop.
Prepare yourself for in-class critiques
and find yourself immersed in lively discussions with fellow writers as your
leader guides your conversation along. With such tranquility along with rousing
discussion, the atmosphere at the Tinker Mountain Writers' Workshop is sure to
bring out the best in your writing.
2013 Workshop Course Descriptions
Advanced Novel
"A novel is really like a symphony," Katherine Anne Porter once said, "where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other." Whether you’re working on conventional or experimental fiction, your novel is shaped by the instruments you choose: the scenes you select and extend, the voices in which you describe them, and your treatment of narrative time. In this workshop, we will examine your novel excerpt (of no more than 20 double-spaced pages) for both technique and the critical impulses that inspire a long work of fiction. What pressures exist in your work that create novelistic tension, and how can these pressures be further exploited? What is your novel accomplishing in its narrative tracks, character arcs, and structural shape? For any writer who has completed several polished chapters or a first draft of a novel, this workshop will help you evaluate how your approach to the novel is working for you and offer you ideas for development and revision.
Instructor:
Fred Leebron, advanced fiction
Beginning Novel (beginner to intermediate)
As readers, when we settle in with a novel, we make a commitment. Whether it delivers sympathetic characters, moving situations, or gorgeous prose, if we are drawn in, we are usually drawn in for good, for days on end. A novel is also the most forgiving form of storytelling we have—inherently generous, comfortable and satisfying in its depth— and perhaps the most daunting to begin. In this workshop, we will focus on finding a manageable way to look at the broad story from the very early stages. How do we choose a compelling place to open and a compelling point of view from which to see everything we need to see? What do these choices tell us about what is to come, and how quickly we need to come to it? Bring a loose outline and a draft of your first chapter. Leave with a plan.
Instructor:
Ashley Warlick, fiction
Poetry and Beyond: Tradition and Beyond
This class examines what strong poetry does, but also what it might still do. To that end, we will look at some traditional poetic techniques and sample some experimental forms. As we discuss and analyze your writing, we will work to strengthen the foundations of our poetic craft while asking how we might venture into new formal territory. This course is geared both toward students who are just starting to write poetry and toward those with experience who are looking to reinvigorate their practice. Expect some outside reading/writing, in-class exercises, and of course workshop of student poems. Special topics this year include meter, the poetic fragment, and titles. Participants should bring 10 pages of their poetry (at least three poems).Instructor: Nick Lantz, poetry, all levels
Re(en)vision: A Workshop for Short Fiction Writers With Manuscripts That Have Been Rejected at Least Once
Few writers enjoy learning that a magazine or journal has "passed" on work to which they’ve devoted long hours and much energy, and yet most writers will experience exponentially more rejection in their writing lives than acceptance. This short fiction workshop is designed for writers who don’t want to give up on manuscripts that have been turned down and want to see in rejection an opportunity to revise and develop stories, but now with the clearer, sharper vision that comes from knowing that at least one editor, for reasons that may or may not have been specified, loved it less than the writer does. In this workshop we'll approach rejection as a positive part of a story's progress from draft to published work. We’ll do our best to identify what each writer has succeeded in accomplishing in his or her story as well as what stood in the way of its publication. Writers should bring to the workshop a fiction manuscript of no more than 18 pages and, if possible, one or more of the rejection letters it garnered. Together we’ll help one another’s stories reach the larger audiences they want and, I believe, deserve.Instructor: Dan Mueller, intermediate to advanced
Shaping Drafts: An Advanced Poetry Workshop
Making successful poems requires the writer to read the drafts as mysteries. To shape a poem's energies, we must let its energies shape our shaping. It is a dance of both proximity and distance, vision and blindness. This workshop invites poets with experience and a mature sense of aesthetic persuasion to explore the delicate art of tapping into a poem's urgencies, a kind of open heart surgery. We will grow more familiar with the anatomy and texture of poetry: image, word, diction, voice, syntactical configurations, rhetorical devices, and matters of form and tradition — stanza, line, punctuation, and page. In addition to having our poems read and discussed, we will read widely and closely poems from across the ages as well as read essays on craft. To be considered, please submit no more than six poems and a 200-word description of what you hope to gain from the workshop to tmoeckel@hollins.edu.
Instructor:
Thorpe Moeckel, advanced poetry
Stretching Your Short Fiction
Writerly evolution most frequently takes place as a series of great evolutionary leaps: writers - often inspired by some profound challenge or undertaking - find themselves suddenly, swiftly, and significantly advanced in their art. This workshop, through challenging writing exercises, far-ranging discussion, and intense scrutiny of participants' manuscripts, will endeavor to induce just such an evolutionary leap. Prepare to leave the class both exhausted and changed.
Instructor:
Pinckney Benedict, intermediate to advanced
Survival Stories: Nonfiction on Crisis
This workshop is for people writing about crucial difficult experiences and about the moments when one way of thinking about one’s life stops, and another begins. Difficulty, or crisis, disrupts the “continuously rewritten autobiography we all carry with us in our minds,” as Charles L. Mee writes. Writing can be the bridge, the way to connect up the story again. Writing about crisis can be the way to move forward in our writing lives, creating new wholeness in narratives and meditations. And crisis writing allows us to explore difficulty. It allows us to explore fresh territory as we articulate what happened, how it felt and what we think about it now. We will aim for accuracy, insight, and discovery. We will try to create writing about difficulty that is as urgent and compelling on the page as the experience feels in our lives. The workshop will focus on experimenting with the technical elements of artful nonfiction, and creating original, distinctive work. We will read each other’s work closely and try daily writing exercises for revision and generating new material. We will also read and discuss essays and memoir excerpts as time allows. Please bring a manuscript to share (up to 15 double-spaced pages).Kathryn Rhett, creative nonfiction, all levels
The Art and Craft of Screenwriting (and Adaptation)
This intensive and challenging workshop will guide screenwriters through the entire screenwriting process: idea, story, structure, scenes, dialogue, pacing, etc. In short, the elements of a professional grade screenplay (or television pilot). And for those adapting a novel, short story, or play, we will review fundamental strategies for writing a successful adaptation. The workshop also involves the practical analysis of feature-length screenplays and movies to see what works and what does not, and considerable time table reading and workshopping pages. We will also look at proven methods for writing a strong logline and synopsis. The logline and synopsis are arguably the biggest selling tools a writer uses, yet they are often overlooked by emerging screenwriters. It is recommended that students arrive with a short synopsis, the first 10-25 pages of their screenplay, and a beat sheet or treatment for that screenplay.Khris Baxter, all levels
Time after Time in Memoir and Personal Essay
"I wish I knew then what I know now," might be reason enough to set your pen to paper. The memoirist Sven Birkerts says, "I need to give the reader both the unprocessed feeling of the world as I saw it then and a reflective vantage point that incorporates or suggests that these events made a different kind of sense over time." In this workshop we’ll focus on those events that gave our lives shape and how our writing might help us review "now" at we experienced "then." Whether you’re leaning toward the narrative of memoir or the reflection and focus in personal essay, we’ll look at how to craft both showing and telling, with an eye on timing, balance, and reader engagement. Open to all levels, this workshop will offer examples, reading assignments and/or exercises if needed, a sympathetic audience, and individual conferences. Please bring one or two examples (up to 20 pages double spaced) of your work in progress.Instructor: James McKean, creative nonfiction, all levels
Contact
Tinker Mountain Writers' WorkshopHollins University
Christine Powell
P.O. Box 9552
Roanoke, VA 24020-1552
(540) 362-6229
Fax: (540) 561-2325
cpowell@hollins.edu
http://www.hollins.edu/summerprograms/tmww/index.shtml
It is winter in Roanoke, VA now, but by June 2013, it will be a beautiful green instead of a beautiful white.
Go to the website for details about costs and faculty. This is an excellent workshop for beginner or advanced writers to submerge themselves into the writing life for a week of concentrated growth in a supportive setting.
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Go To Entry # 70 - 6/22/12 of my blog for personal impressions of this workshop.
Blog Bio. Notes
Jan Bowman’s work has
appeared in Roanoke Review, Big Muddy,
Broadkill Review, Trajectory, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato
Eyes, and others. She won the 2011
Roanoke Review Prize for Fiction. Glimmer Train nominated a story as an
Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Award for New Writers. Her stories have been nominated for two
Pushcart Prizes, two O’Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. A story
was a finalist in the “So To Speak”
Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of
short stories and currently shopping for a publisher for a completed story
collection. Her nonfiction work appears in recent Pen-in-Hand
and Trajectory. She writes a weekly
blog of “Reflections” on the writing
life and posts regular interviews with writers, editors and publishers. Learn more at:Website – www.janbowmanwriter.com
Blogsite – http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com
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