The Writer's Center, located in Bethesda, MD, will be hosting three free master class workshops:
Form and Feeling: A Poetry Workshop for High School Students
Meets 4 Tuesdays, 7 to 9:30 p.m., October 2 through October 23Instructor: Rose Solari
This workshop is for those who already enjoy reading and writing poetry, and want to strengthen their skills and deepen their knowledge. Through weekly poetry writing assignments and discussions, we’ll explore the elements of poetry, from line length and line breaks to voice and rhythm, examining how a poem comes together into a unified and meaningful whole. We’ll work with formal and free verse, lyric poems and narrative poems. You should bring a poem you’ve recently written to the first class to share and discuss; after that, expect to generate a new poem each week in response to the assignments. Outside reading of contemporary poets will add to our discussion.
To Apply: Submit 3 to 5 poems to The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD. Submission deadline: September 10.
Rose Solari is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Orpheus in the Park, and Difficult Weather, and two chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in many journals here and in the U.K., including Parnassus, Gargoyle, Poet Lore, The Mississippi Review, The Potomac Review, and Nth Position, and her poetry and prose have appeared in several anthologies, including American Poetry: The Next Generation; Enhanced Gravity: More Fiction by Washington Area Women; and Women: Images and Realities, A Multicultural Reader. Her other honors and awards include the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize (selected by Philip Levine) and, in 2007, her third Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist’s Grant. She has taught at the Writer's Center for fifteen years, and joined the board of directors there in 2006.
Discovering the Personal Essay
Meets 4 Thursdays, 7 to 9:30 p.m., October 11 through November 1
Instructor: William O’Sullivan
The personal essay is, in the words of essayist Joseph Epstein, “a form of discovery.” In this workshop, we'll look at ways to turn your experience into personal essays in which you open yourself to discovery about yourself and the world around you. You'll also come to see how the personal essay is receptive to virtually any topic, no matter how “ordinary.” Through exercises, assignments, readings, and discussion, you'll learn not only the best ways to tell your personal stories but also how to be a discerning reader of others' work—which in turn is a great way to improve your own writing. Participants should be comfortable sharing their work and participating in constructive workshop discussions.
To apply: Submit a personal essay or excerpt of no more than 5 pages. Submission Deadline: September 23.
William O'Sullivan, MFA, essayist, editor, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow. His personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, National Geographic Traveler, The Washingtonian, and The North American Review, among others. He has received two Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and his work has been listed three times among the notable essays of the year in The Best American Essays.
Fiction Master Class
Meets 4 Tuesdays, 7 to 9:30 p.m., October 2 through 23 at The Writer’s Center
Instructor: Barbara Esstman
This workshop is designed to improve your writing in general and your fiction in particular. We'll do a series of exercises targeting a range of issues, from writing tight, precise prose to learning how to more easily enter the creative space of a story, with particular attention to concrete detail, dialogue, conflict, interior-exterior movement and the other basics of all fiction. The exercises will let you concentrate on a few skills at a time and often are the beginnings of longer works that you can continue working on after the workshop is ended. A good class for serious writers who want to understand how to consciously make their stories better.
To apply: Submit 1 short story or a 3 to 5 page excerpt of a novel. Submission deadline: September 10.
Barbara Esstman, MFA, is a National Endowment for the Arts, VCCA and Virginia Commission for the Arts fellow and a Redbook fiction award winner, among other distinctions. Her two novels, The Other Anna and Night Ride Home, were published by Harcourt Brace and HarperCollins and are in numerous foreign editions. Both books were adapted for television by Hallmark Productions. She co-edited an anthology, A More Perfect Union, published by St. Martin's Press, and has taught extensively in universities.
For additional information on programs at The Writer’s Center, please visit their Web site,
www.writer.org
