I’m excited to be working with some of the writers from the Hampden Writer’s Group over the next few weeks. The title of the workshop is “Tell It Slant: Real Life as Raw Material for Good Fiction.” (You can register via Eventbrite here.) We’ll be generating a lot of new material together, but we’ll also be reading exemplary texts. Here are a few for us to consider right out of the gate:
For this evening (10/20):
- “Invent a New Creation Myth” + “Spelling It Out” by Abigail Thomas (from Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life)
- “LZ Gator, Vietnam, February 1994” by Tim O’Brien (from In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction)
- “Four Skinny Trees” by Sandra Cisneros (from The House on Mango Street)
For next week (10/27):
- “The Half-Known World” by Robert Boswell (from The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction)
- “Round Trip” by John D’Agata (from Halls of Fame)