Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown

2024 Summer Workshops

Aja Gabel The Story, The Engine, The Obsession: A Fiction Workshop June 21 to June 26, 2020 Tuition: $650 Workshop: 1-4pm Discipline: Fiction OPEN TO ALL On-site Housing Available

In this workshop, we’ll look at engines that power our stories, and obsessions that fuel our practice. Stories are born in all kinds of ways: an enigmatic character begging for understanding, a liminal location, a crystalline image, a hairpin plot turn, maybe even a piece of music, a photograph, or a talisman. Through readings, discussion, and craft lessons, we’ll look at all these elements to discover they can power the path of writing your story. Through workshop critique and exercises we’ll look at our own obsessions, and try to identify exactly what we’re interested in articulating through writing, and what we’re after in our own practice and process.

Please email a piece of writing for workshop—a short story or novel excerpt, 5-20 pages, double-spaced, 12-point font—to Dawn Walsh at dwalsh@fawc.org by June 10. Please also come prepared with an artifact of some kind (a poem, a song, a photo, an anecdote) that you consider to be the place where this story began for you.

Biography

Aja Gabel’s debut novel, The Ensemble, is out now from Riverhead Books. Her short fiction can be found in the Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, BOMB, and elsewhere. She studied writing at Wesleyan University and the University of Virginia, and has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. She currently lives and writes in Los Angeles.