2024 Summer Workshops
THIS WORKSHOP IS FULL
This class is open to prose writers working in any number of forms: short stories, novels, personal essays, memoirs, experimental prose, and all of the spaces in between. In class we will work toward demystifying some of the essential components of great prose (image, metaphor, structure, dialogue, character, scene, among others) and turning them into comprehensible tools that are at our disposal. At the same time we will honor (and hope for) the inexplicable flights of creativity (and madness?) that take a good story and make it great. One of the things we will talk about is the ever expanding grey area that exists between fiction and nonfiction: the fictionalized memoir, the autobiographical novel, the lyric personal narrative, and how we might go about deciding what genre best suits a particular body of work.
BY APPLICATION ONLY.
To apply:
This class requires a writing sample for admittance. Interested participants should submit five pages of prose in application to workshops@fawc.org prior to registering for the class. If this class is not yet full, your submission will hold your space in the workshop. You will be notified within a week of your acceptance, at which point you will need to register and make your payment in full via FAWC’s website.
If you are admitted to the class, you will be asked to bring ten copies of a manuscript of between ten and twenty pages of prose to distribute to your fellow workshop members. We will spend some percentage of class time on those manuscripts as well as writing we do all together. Please also read Battleborn, by Claire Vaye Watkins, and Citizen, by Claudia Rankine.
Biography
Pam Houston is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, all published by W.W. Norton, including Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, Cowboys Are My Weakness, and Airmail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics and Place, coauthored with Amy Irvine. She teaches in the low residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and at UC Davis, and is the co-founder and artistic director of the literary nonprofit, Writing By Writers. She lives in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.