Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown

2024 Summer Workshops

Jill Bialosky A Lie That Tells The Truth: Fiction Workshop July 15 to July 20, 2018 Tuition: $600 Workshop: 9am-Noon Discipline: Fiction INTERMEDIATE/ADVANCED On-site Housing Available

Pablo Picasso famously said, that art “is a lie that tells a truth.” This workshop will focus on voice, point of view, character and narrative strategies in writing urgent and compelling fiction. I will offer techniques using memory, personal, experience and fictive techniques to create a fictional reality. How does a piece of writing transform itself into artfulness? How does fiction get at personal and universal truths? How can a fictive voice be called upon in order to dig deeper and raise the stakes? We all know that the most convincing writing comes from urgent subject matter. How do we take this material and shape it into artful fiction. Jill Bialosky will offer writing prompts and exercises to generate new material and to reshape existing material. We will examine student writing as well as look at select pieces of fiction as guideposts for transformation.

Biography

Jill Bialosky's most recent memoir, Poetry Will Save Your Life, was published in 2017. She is the author of four collections of poetry, The Players, Intruder, Subterranean, and The End of Desire; three critically acclaimed novels, The Prize, House Under Snow, and The Life Room; and the New York Times bestselling memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life. She is co-editor, with Helen Schulman, of the anthology, Wanting A Child. Her poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, O Magazine, Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, among other publications.