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Natalie Serber

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Craft Conversations: Place: Setting Down Roots

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Everything that happens in our lives and in our stories happens somewhere. Setting is a building block of fiction and memoir. During this discussion and workshop we will take a thorough look at how to build a vibrant and invigorating setting. Be it the cereal aisle of a grocery store, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, a classroom, or in bed at night—settings are opportunities to reveal character, heighten theme, and create tone. Through writing examples, prompts and ample discussion, you will leave this workshop with a firmer grip on how to enliven your work with setting, specifically: How the right detail can activate a setting How setting reflects/reveals interiority and puts pressure on our characters (even when the character is you!) How place can trigger…

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$75

One Page Wednesday: June

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Here is an opportunity to share or listen to one page of work in progress from talented writers from everywhere. Come with a single page of work and sign up to read – or come to listen and prepare to be inspired! Hosted by Natalie Serber. June’s featured reader is Kelli Russell Agodon. Click here to register in advance. You don’t need to live in Portland to participate. If you have questions, please contact jessica@literary-arts.org Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of four collections of poetry. Her newest book is Dialogues with Rising Tides from Copper Canyon Press. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press where she works as an editor and book cover designer. She is also the Co-Director of Poets on the…

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Free

Craft Conversations: Character

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

If you are interested in taking a dive into how to make full, complicated, compelling characters in your work, if you want your reader to be thinking about your people (even if that character is you) long after they finish your novel, story, or memoir, if you want to deeply engage your reader, you must develop characters that drive the story, that matter to the reader, that we can root for, that rise up off the page. For this conversation I’ll bring, readings, handouts, exercises and practical ideas. We will look at protagonists, as well as at secondary characters and the important jobs they have in making a story come to life. Access Program We want our writing classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless…

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$75

Six Love Stories in Six Weeks

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Using Jeffrey Eugenides, My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, Great Love Stories from Chekov to Munro, we will fall in love, once again, with our writing. Did the pandemic take a toll on your creative spirits? I invite you to join me, speed date your way back to the page with a new story each week. We will read great love stories, then use them as (lovers’) leaps into new work. Come prepared to swipe right on many generative prompts, to share your work, to end the workshop with 6 flash fiction pieces, or starts to new stories, or opportunities to invigorate old loves. Access Program We want our writing classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition…

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$290

Craft Conversations: Dialogue

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Dialogue, as much as anything else, reveals the character to the writer and, ultimately to the reader. I don’t have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. ~ Joan Didion Sometimes, when I’m lucky, a line of dialogue, either something I’ve dreamed up or overheard, will spark a story. Because dialogue is so revealing it can be an entrance point, a moment when a character speaking, reveals themself on the page. Because dialogue is the only time the reader directly hears from the characters without the filter of the narrator, the spoken words become a measure for the heart and mind of the characters. What do they want? What are they trying to gain or conceal? How is dialog…

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$75

One Page Wednesday – August

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Here is an opportunity to share or listen to one page of work in progress from talented writers from everywhere. Come with a single page of work and sign up to read – or come to listen and prepare to be inspired! Hosted by Natalie Serber. This month’s featured reader is Mary Lou Buschi. Click here to register in advanced. You don’t need to live in Portland to participate. If you have questions, please contact jessica@literary-arts.org Mary Lou Buschi’s second full-length collection, Paddock, was published through Lily Poetry Review Books, May 15, 2021. Mary Lou is the author of one earlier collection of poems, Awful Baby. She is also the author of three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals such as FIELD,…

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Free

Memoir Infusion

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. – William Faulkner If the primary purpose of literature is connection, what better way to accomplish that goal than through telling our experiences and how they formed us. This 8-week course is designed for writers already engaged in writing a memoir, who have some knowledge of the craft, and have begun a few chapters of a full-length memoir or have a handful of connected essays for a series of personal essays. Together we’ll discuss elements of craft including, but not limited to, narrative drive and tension, time, scene vs. summary narration, character development (including dialogue), ethics of truth and our faulty memories as we try to recreate our pasts on the page. We’ll also study structure,…

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$570

Spring Forward, Fall Back: Time in Prose Writing

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

How to handle time can be challenging to master when writing in any genre. When should we slow down and dwell in a scene? When should we summarize and move rapidly through weeks, years, or even decades? Should we go back in time to unpack and understand a character’s motivation? How does the manipulation of time, the unfolding of events, work in a short story, a novel, or in memoir? This workshop will explore how writers bend time to create different narrative effects. We will read work by Tessa Hadley, Rachel Cusk, Sally Rooney, Toni Morrison, John Cheever and others, as well as look at examples from TV shows and films such as Ted Lasso, Atlanta, and The Lost Daughter. After the discussion, we’ll work…

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$145

Stamp Collecting: Another Approach to Memoir Writing

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Do you think in lengthy narrative strands, elegantly formed with a beginning, middle and an end? I don’t. I flit from image, to feeling, to recrimination, to joy. Light flickers over my memories, both happy and hard. I call these messy memories ‘stamps,’ events or moments that have imprinted upon me in unshakeable ways. In this workshop we will mimic our thinking on the page. We’ll write short pieces from our lives using strong storytelling techniques to enliven specific moments that changed us. We won’t be writing anecdotes, the funny stories we may tell a friend on a walk or a seatmate on a long flight. We will be writing the stories from our lives that haunt us, with joy and sorrow and growth. Finally,…

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$145

Leave the Door Open On The Way Out: Endings in Fiction

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

We’re all familiar with satisfying story shape, the arc of a story that follows the pattern of jokes and sex—the inciting incident, rising action, crisis and the falling action. Yet sometimes this pattern can leave a story flat, without room for wonder. If a story leads exactly where you would expect it to go, then both the writer and the reader have discovered nothing. How do we expand our well-behaved, satisfying stories to fully burst into the mystery and unpredictability of human experience? In this workshop we will look at a few endings to short stories by Anton Chekov, Alice Munro, James Joyce, Charles Baxter, Tessa Hadley, ZZ Packer, Carmen Maria Machado, and others, for ways they use time, imagery, dialog, and omission to open…

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$145
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