MFA Crash Course: Class Schedule Sneak Peak

Trust me, this isn’t everything. You’d keel over if you saw all the classes I’m attending in a ten-day period. Instead, here are a few lectures I most look forward to attending. Get ready to win prizes, including a query crit from my agent and a ten-page crit from writer Eleanor Morse.

“Le Mot Juste – The Right Word: A Grammar of Vividness”
Sena Jeter Naslund, Program Director and NY Times Bestselling author of Ahab’s Wife
An exploration in “freshness in word choice as a source of power.”

“Online Marketing for Writers”
Lori A. May
Key concepts in building a strategic online presence to promote your writing.

“Surrender: The Act of Method-Writing”
Silas House
An exploration of “ways writers must give themselves over to the characters so that the piece of writing can bloom on its own.”

“The Crossover Novel: Writing for Two Markets”
Joyce McDonald
An exploration of the “fictional elements that distinguish crossover books from those that are written strictly for either the teen or adult market.”

“What Makes a Story Matter?”
Eleanor Morse
An exploration of the “language, setting, emotional charge, and connection to a larger universe which contribute to fiction that feels significant and endures beyond its own time and place.”

Plus I get to hear all of these amazing authors read at Spalding’s Festival of Contemporary Writing.

○ Molly Peacock (poetry), The Second Blush
○ Robin Lippincott (fiction), In the Meantime
○ Susan Campbell Bartoletti (writing for children), The Boy Who Dared
○ Richard Goodman (nonfiction), The Soul of Creative Writing
○ Mary Yukari Waters (fiction), The Favorites
○ Luke Wallin (nonfiction), Conservation Writing: Essays at the Crossroads of Nature and Culture
○ Debra Kang Dean (poetry), Precipitates
○ Maureen Morehead (poetry), A Sense of Time Left
○ Julie Brickman (fiction), What Birds Can Only Whisper
○ Sam Zalutsky (screenwriting), You Belong to Me
○ Elaine Orr (creative nonfiction), Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life
○ Crystal Wilkinson (fiction), Water Street
○ Greg Pape (poetry), American Flamingo
○ Eleanor Morse (fiction), An Unexpected Forest
○ Joyce McDonald (writing for children), Devil on My Heels
○ Brad Riddell (screenwriting), The Plebe
○ Jeanie Thompson (poetry), The Seasons Bear Us
○ Rachel Harper (fiction), Brass Ankle Blues
○ Nancy McCabe (nonfiction), After the Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening
○ Silas House (fiction), Eli the Good
○ David Kipen, The Schreiber Theory.
○ Charlie Schulman (playwriting, screenwriting), The Fartiste
○ Kirby Gann (fiction), Our Napoleon in Rags
○ Dianne Aprile (nonfiction), The Eye Is Not Enough: On Seeing and Remembering
○ Roy Hoffman (fiction, nonfiction), Chicken Dreaming Corn; Back Home
○ Kathleen Driskell (poetry), Seed Across Snow
○ Sena Jeter Naslund (fiction), Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette
○ Eric Schmiedl (playwriting), Browns Rules
○ Marcia Dalton (Fleur-de-Lis Press author, fiction), The Ice Margin
○ Kira Obolensky (playwriting), Raskol
○ Louella Bryant (fiction), Full Bloom: Stories
○ Amy Clark (poetry), Stray Home
○ Richard Newman (poetry), Domestic Fugues
○ Barry George (poetry), Wrecking Ball & Other Urban Haiku
○ Katerina Stoykova-Klemer (poetry), The Air Around the Butterfly
○ Joan Donaldson (young-adult novel), On Viney’s Mountain
○ Edith M. Hemingway (middle-grade novel), Road to Tater Hill

Don’t forget to follow my blog to win prizes beginning Friday, May 21! See here for more details.