A Writer's Sampler

The Literary Arts Council presents another series of classes featuring the best instructors in the area. These lively, homework-free sessions will stimulate every writer’s appetite. Be nourished by some or all of these inspiring evenings. Bring a notebook and pen.

Ages 16 and above are welcome.

4 Mondays, 7 – 9 p.m. Fee, $15 each, $50 for all four. Early registration is recommended to secure space and course materials.

March 3: Michael Shapiro - A SENSE OF PLACE: How to Imbue One's Writing with This Essential Element Whether you're writing fiction, travel or an investigative piece, incorporating a sense of place will make your writing compelling to the reader. I will discuss how I do this (using all five senses, dialogue, etc.) and give examples from several of the writers I interview for my book, including Isabel Allende, Pico Iyer, Frances Mayes (who's also a poet), Bill Bryson, Paul Theroux and others. Michael Shapiro is a freelance writer and editor, whose work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler (cover story May-June 2006), the Washington Post, The Sun, and the New York Times. He is the author of the award-winning A Sense of Place, a collection of interviews with 18 of the world's leading travel writers.

March 10: Dan Coshnear - Beneath Those Lovely Sentences: Attempts to Describe Story Structures A story makes an implicit promise and an effective story fills it, often in a surprising way. We'll be examining the kinds of structures that compel stories forward and that satisfy readers' expectations. We begin by asking what we expect from a story, then how do contemporary writers pull us in, tip us off balance and still manage to bring the big payoff? Daniel Coshnear works at a group home for men and women with mental illnesses and substance issues. He teaches writing through a variety of university extension programs. He is author of Jobs & Other Preoccupations (Helicon Nine 2000), winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Award and has received a number of other awards for stories including an Isherwood Foundation Fellowship and the Missouri Review Editor's Prize. He is currently at work on a new collection of stories.

March 17: Jamey Genna - Writing the Quickie: Flash Fiction Sometimes when we write, a story just wants to be shorter than the typical short story. These stories are often referred to as flash fiction, sudden fiction, or even microfiction. They can be stories that need to be less than a thousand words, sometimes less than five hundred words-sometimes they look like poems. What makes these stories, stories? In this class we'll read several short-shorts, now commonly referred to by industry standards as flash fiction, and we'll try our hand at writing our own "quickie" pieces of fiction. We'll ask questions of our writing on whether our story is a scene meant for a longer piece of work or if it is complete and whole as is. Most importantly we'll ask ourselves what our characters desire and what gives the story its own sense of yearning. Jamey Genna teaches writing in California and is a graduate from the masters in writing program at the University of San Francisco. Her flash fiction and short fiction has been published in many fine literary magazines both on-line and in print, including Cutthroat, Dislocate, Shade, Pinyon, Storyglossia, Vestal Review, and Verbsap. Her story "Stories I heard when I went home for my grandmother's funeral" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her collection of short-shorts and flash fiction was a finalist for the 2007 Elixir Press Chapbook contest.

March 24: Elizabeth Carothers Herron - THE GIVEN AND THE MADE: Dreams and Poetry as Gestures of the Soul Dreams and Poetry bring together two points of access to the rich field of the unconscious. As a trance state, writing like dreaming, allows us to move into knowledge beyond the realm of the ego. We recognize both states by their dissolution of ordinary boundaries and the forming of fresh unusual associations. In dreams, these associations provide illuminating metaphors.In poetry the associations underlie poetic images. The images carry insights, much as a traveler carries baggage. They are the camels of poetry, crossing distances previously unimagined. Thus it is that poetry surprises us and informs our lives with renewed vitality. Making a poem is a kind of journey; we end up having arrived somewhere new. If the poem is well-made, readers, too, will find something shifting inside them. Grasping the metaphors of the trance (or the dream) takes concentration. To make the associations live in the poem, as implied or direct metaphors, we must hone the image to its essence, sometimes through ellipse and implication. This takes practice and a passionate absorption in language itself, a deeper trance. Tonight we will work with this process. As Professor of Arts & Humanities at Sonoma State University, Dr. Elizabeth Herron taught courses as far ranging as Dreams & Imagination, Ecological Identity, Creative Writing and more. Elizabeth's essays have appeared in Parabola, Orion, ReVision and EarthSpirit . She is the author of five small books of poetry, and a collection of short fiction. Her collaboration with sculptor Bruce Johnson led to the writing of The Poet's House, a book length poem. .

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