Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown

2024 Summer Workshops

Joan Wickersham Unlocking the Story June 21 to June 26, 2020 Tuition: $750 Workshop: 9am-1pm Discipline: Multi-Genre OPEN TO ALL On-site Housing Available

What is my story and how do I tell it? All writers – no matter how seasoned – grapple with these questions, day after day, project after project. This intensive workshop for fiction and memoir writers will focus on finding the story and telling it in the most frank, fresh, compelling way possible. The class will include both generative writing exercise and workshop discussion. We will look at different techniques used by writers, as well as working from prompts, all with the goal of unlocking the stories that most urgently need to be told. We will also spend time discussing student work. By the end of the week, we each will have found rich new resources to draw upon for future work.

Please bring 11 copies of a piece of fiction or memoir, no longer than 5 double-spaced, 12-point font pages, to the workshop; and please bring a notebook to class along with a few photographs of personal significance.

Biography

Joan Wickersham's The News from Spain was named one of the year’s best fiction picks by National Public Radio, Kirkus, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Her memoir The Suicide Index was a National Book award finalist. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and many other publications, and she is a regular op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe. She has taught at Harvard, Emerson, UMass Boston, and Bennington. Her work in progress, Conversations with a Shipwreck, is currently available through Scandinavia House NYC in an online exhibition created with photographer Adam Davies. http://www.scandinaviahouse.org/events/conversations_with_a_shipwreck/