2010 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 inspired 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

Advanced Short Story
Most writers begin their work as children, full of joy and effortless enthusiasm. When we become experienced and begin to harbor professional aspirations, however, we tend to overemphasize the importance of discipline and technique, with a resulting loss to the work of energy and charisma. In this workshop, we will critique and discuss a draft of your short story (no more than 7,000 words, and ideally perhaps 5,000) with an eye to transcending discipline and rediscovering the easy ecstasy and simple delights of our early writing efforts. This workshop is intended for mature story writers who have mastered the mechanical aspects of story-writing and who now seek to find a new level of pleasure, excitement and achievement beyond the purely technical.
Instructor: Pinckney Benedict, advanced fiction

From Generation to Revision
This poetry workshop is for students of all levels. Alongside the traditional workshop model of reading and discussing students’ poems, we will participate in a number of in-class writing exercises designed to broaden our understanding of textual strategies. We will also explore opportunities for generating new poems, as well as discuss vital revision techniques to create drafts with which readers will engage.
Instructor: Jon Pineda, poetry

Objectifying Memory: Advanced Memoir Workshop
Writing memoir can feel like swimming in the dark, with little solid to grasp, currents pulling all ways, and a sense of real danger. In this workshop for writers already deeply involved in memoir projects we'll explore narrative techniques that exploit the physical or objective to help you establish solidity as you continue transforming a personal past into language. Through exercises, readings, and discussion of each other's work, we'll examine ways to invest objects with narrative import; use objective reportorial techniques to portray difficult figures; modulate distance by making the narrator both subject and object; and build sensual images that articulate motion. Please bring up to twenty double-spaced pages of your memoir-in-progress and be ready to explore more deeply a place, object, and moment lingering in your memory.
Instructor: Jane Alison, creative nonfiction

Putting it all Down: Poetry Workshop
"I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave it all out would be another, and truer, way," writes John Ashbery. In this poetry writing workshop we will consider how poetry can best articulate our individual/idiosyncratic experience and emotion. How are we to balance the real and imaginary; the conscious and unconscious; chaos and order? Combining writing prompts and exercises, both specific to the local surroundings and within the classroom setting, students will aspire to write new and ambitious poetry, which we will then critique in class. As well as aiming to write publishable poems, the workshop will equally value the development of articulate and intelligent responses to the poems of others.
Instructor: Sally Keith, poetry

What’s In; What’s Out: Fashioning Memoirs
It’s been said that memoir writing is less a problem of finding something to say and more of what to leave out. In this class we’ll address the process of surveying our memories, the artifacts and old photos, the hearsay and family anecdotes, all the evidence of "then," so that we might choose what to include in the stories we tell "now." In addition, we’ll focus on Annie Dillard’s notion of "fashioning a text" by concentrating on such elements as voice, point of view, significant detail, character development, and form and language. Open to all levels, the workshop will offer examples, reading assignments, short exercises if needed, and a sympathetic audience for your writing as well as individual conferences. Whether you intend your memoir to celebrate, eulogize, reflect, inform or persuade (Dillard again), our workshop will work toward fashioning lively, thought-provoking narratives on the page. Please bring all the memories you can and one or two short examples (five to ten pages each) of your work in progress.
Instructor: James McKean, creative nonfiction

Writing About and Through Psychological Trauma: A Hybrid Workshop
For the sixty or so years that English departments have offered creative writing workshops, writers have been encouraged to avoid the big issues and to write what they know or, failing that, to follow Emily Dickinson’s dictum: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant." Like many of the axioms passed from one generation of writers to the next, a legitimate warning is no doubt contained within this advice, and it is not surprising that the most damaging experiences often resist the writer’s best efforts to render them. In this workshop we’ll examine the narrative and poetical strategies for writing about and through psychological trauma. This workshop is for writers interested in delving headlong into dangerous subject matter and discovering not only what can be salvaged from the trials we and/or our characters have endured but whether the very symptom associated with psychological trauma suggest alternative ways of storytelling. Writers should bring no more than 15 pages of original fiction or creative non-fiction to the workshop and expect a variety of short outside readings and in-class writing exercises.
Instructor: Dan Mueller, fiction/creative nonfiction

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 two hundred word description of what you hope to gain from the workshop to tmoeckel@hollins.edu by May 15th.
Instructor: Thorpe Moeckel, advanced poetry

The Shape of Fictions: Structure in the Short Story
This intensive workshop will focus on shape and structure in short fiction. Through discussions of student manuscripts, reading assignments, and writing exercises, we will explore both traditional and unconventional approaches to structure and shaping, the link between form and meaning, and strategies for revision. This workshop is designed for all levels of short story writers who are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of structure and shape in the short story and committed to participating in a rigorous dialogue about the craft of fiction. Students should come with stories in hand and also be prepared to generate new work.
Instructor: Laura van den Berg, fiction

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