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INPRINT is offering non-credit writing workshops this winter and spring that provide an opportunity for people to explore fiction, personal essay, memoir, novella and poetry. The workshops are taught by some of Houston's finest writers--alumni, students, and faculty of the UH Creative Writing Program--as well as other Houston area published authors and college faculty. Class size is limited to 12 students (TAWW to 15) and each class will be filled on a first-come, first served basis. No refunds given after classes begin. LOCATION: THE INPRINT HOUSE 1520 W. MAIN HOUSTON, TX 77006 For
more information, Registrations
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WINTER/SPRING 2007 POETRY, MEMOIR, FICTION, PERSONAL ESSAY, NOVELLA, TEACHERS AS WRITERS FICTION
This workshop offers writers the opportunity to develop and hone their poetry. We will read as writers, exploring and discussing a variety of contemporary and traditional poems to mine them for techniques and inspiration. Using a combination of creative in-class exercises and generative projects, we will draft and workshop eight poems, revising one or two to completion. New and experienced writers are welcome. SASHA WEST's poetry and reviews have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Chelsea, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University and is currently a PhD candidate in the UH Creative Writing Program. CLICK
HERE for a registration form
Memoir has become a popular form, as the number of published memoirs in recent years attests. With this in mind, we'll discuss some of the reasons for this and some themes that commonly emerge. We'll explore questions raised by the genre. What are the goals of memoir writing? How are lives transformed when they become stories? William Zinsser writes that "memoir is the art of inventing the truth." With that in mind, what are our responsibilities to truth, and what freedoms do we have when we write a memoir? In this class, we'll read, write, and talk about our own work and offer helpful feedback to one another. We will also discuss excerpts from selected memoirs to see some of the possibilities open to us as writers of our lives. KATE SCHMITT is a poet and bookmaker whose writing has been published in the anthologies Earth Shattering Poems, Roots and Flowers, and Light Gathering Poems, as well as in several literary journals. She received her MFA from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where she is currently completing a PhD and has taught literature and writing. CLICK
HERE for a registration form
The writing of fiction involves a creative tension between tradition and individuality, between obeying the "rules" and trusting your intuition. This workshop will be a constructive editorial environment for both beginners and advanced practitioners. We will discuss the challenges and opportunities common to both long and short fiction. Whether you want to put some magic in your realism or some realism in your magic, this might be the workshop for you. Every week we will discuss an essay from Bringing the Devil to His Knees by Charles Baxter and Peter Turchi, available from Brazos Bookstore. ROBERT CREMINS is an Irish writer who has lived for more than a decade in Houston. He has published two novels, A Sort of Homecoming (U.S.) and Send in the Devils (England). A graduate of the University of East Anglia Creative Writing Program in Britain, he has recently contributed a crime story to the forthcoming anthology Lone Star Noir.
for Inprint's Writers Workshops.
"We write so that we may live"--Joan Didion. In this class I will be asking you to create characters that live. I will ask you to shove your characters into sitations that show these unreal people to be most real. Via specific craft talks, workshops, one-on-one meetings and indepth readings we will learn to make our already exisiting projects more vital to us as writers and to the readers we imagine, while also giving us the tools and the springs to continusly create new writing projects that breathe, move, dance, crumble--live. TIPHANIE YANIQUE, Parks Fellow in creative writing at Rice University, is 2006 winner of the Boston Review Fiction Prize. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Best American Voices Anthology. Her fiction can currently be found in the Boston Review, Sonora, Prism International, Callaloo and Global City Review, and is forthcoming in Cream City Review and The London Magazine. CLICK
HERE for a registration form
The personal essay is rich with possibility. From the quirky humor of Erma Bombeck, to the biting rage and intellect of James Baldwin, to the nostalgic and tender musings of Sherwood Anderson, the personal essay remains one of the most thrilling and multifaceted forms of literature for both writer and reader. No other genre captures so completely the muscular magic of language, transforming even the most ordinary daily events into moments of wonder and inspiration. Marriage, work, family, and friends as well as the heartfelt blows of childhood and the strangeness of pop-culture are just some of the day-to-day fodder of the personal essay. In class we will read, write, and discuss several essays as we explore the unique ability of the personal essay to turn everyday life into something that is lyrical, provocative, hysterically funny, and divine. CYNTHIA LEE WILLIAMS earned an MA and a PhD from the UH Creative Writing Program. She has received several writing honors, including an Associated Writing Program Award in fiction. Ms. Williams has recently published in ArtsHouston and Stage Directions. She teaches writing at Houston Community College and is an arts reporter and reviewer for the Houston Press. CLICK
HERE for a registration form
The novella is a prose fiction sitting between the traditional short story and the novel (15,000-50,000 words). It is ideally suited to writers who wish to write an extended piece of fictional prose and not a novel with complex plotting. In essence, the novella concentrates on unity of purpose and design. The character, incident, theme, and language are all focused on contributing to a single issue. This important fictional form has been practiced by almost all the masters—Tolstoy (Death of Ivan Ilych), Kafka (Metamorphosis), Mann (Death in Venice), Conrad (Heart of Darkness)—and contemporaries such as Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye), Don DeLillo (The Body Artist), and Joyce Carol Oates (Black Water). In this course, we will analyze the structure of several novellas, ranging from traditional to innovative. The workshop members will share short stories that have the potential to become longer. They can also bring ideas for novellas and begin from scratch. FARNOOSH MOSHIRI was born into a literary family in Tehran, Iran. She is the author of The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree, a collection of short stories, and three novels, At the Wall of the Almighty, The Bathhouse, and Against Gravity. Currently she is an Associate Professor of literature and creative writing at Syracuse University. She is based in Houston. CLICK
HERE for a registration form
Flannery O'Connor, who grew up poor in Milledgeville, Georgia, and spent most of her life dying from lupus and tending to the ornery peacocks she kept as watchdogs, once said about her own writing, "my subject in fiction is the action of grace in a territory held largely by the devil." In writing our own stories, we will negotiate this space between beauty and mischief as we determine what we like about a given writer's work and how we can lift what we like and incorporate it into our own writing. We're going to create new worlds out of memories, thin air, and language, and we're going to create real people with the power and desire to think for themselves, the power to perform actions we may not have anticipated when we first created them. We're going to read and analyze a wide array of stories and argue over how these stories are structured, crafted, and made miraculous. My hope is that by working together we build a supportive and creative environment that encourages risk-taking, ambition, and self-discovery. GIUSEPPE TAURINO is a recent graduate of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where he served as Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Art. Currently, he is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Houston. He also works as a Senior Writer for Writers in the Schools. CLICK
HERE for a registration form
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