Faculty for the 2014 Writers’ Workshop Program, clockwise from top left: Paulette Alden, Madeleine Blais, Billy Collins, James W. Hall, E.J. Miller Laino, Bich Minh Nguyen, Porter Shreve, Susan Richards Shreve. Not shown: Dara Wier.

The 2014 Writers’ Workshop Program will feature nine unique offerings covering poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir, with courses tailored for writers of all levels. All workshops take place January 12-16, 2014, at various locations in Key West. Workshops are scheduled in the days between the first and second sessions of “The Dark Side”—the 32nd annual Literary Seminar—so that it is possible to attend both a workshop and the Seminar.

Former United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins once again leads the KWLS poetry faculty with a workshop titled “Imaginative Travel.” Admission into the Collins workshop will be based on a required submission of three poems, while E.J. Miller Laino’s workshop is open to poets of all levels with no entrance requirements. Writers interested in Dara Wier’s “Counterintuitive Poetry Workshop” are urged to bring “courage, energetic recklessness, and exquisitely necessary sincerity” to a workshop that will explore and explode preconceived notions of how poetry “should” be written.

Fiction workshops include the “Advanced Fiction Workshop” led by Susan Richards Shreve, the author of fourteen novels and Co-Chairman of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation; and an all-levels workshop with Porter Shreve which will focus on character-building in short stories and novels. James W. Hall’s “Writing a Killer Opening” will focus on particular strategies for beginning a story—whether a crime novel, a thriller, or a literary work of fiction.

Madeleine Blais, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the acclaimed memoir Uphill Walkers, will lead a workshop focused on memoir-writing titled “Personal Narrative in an Impersonal World.” “At the heart of memoir is a conundrum,” Blaise remarks. “While writing about the most subjective of experiences, your own life, you have to find the most objective of frameworks.” Paulette Alden’s “Writers’ Boost: Taking Your Writing to the Next Level” is a hybrid workshop suitable for writers working on either memoir or fiction. Bich Minh Nguyen’s “Exploring Creative Nonfiction” is similarly innovative, promising a careful exploration of what Nguyen calls “an ‘equal opportunity’ genre suited to poets and fiction writers alike.”

Each workshop takes place over the course of four days, with classes in the morning and optional activities, such as open readings and social gatherings, in the evening. An orientation dinner will be provided on January 12. Admission fee for each workshop is $450; scholarships are available to teachers, librarians, students, and writers who can demonstrate financial need. Advance registration is required.

Chapter One of our forthcoming 32nd annual Seminar, The Dark Side, is now fully subscribed and closed to new registrants. A waitlist has begun.

There is still time to register for the Final Chapter, which will take place January 16-19. Speakers at the four-day event, dedicated to the mystery, crime, and thriller genres, will include some of the most prolific and widely-read authors in the world. Among them are Lee Child, creator of the Jack Reacher novels recently brought to the screen by Tom Cruise; Michael Connelly, whose works include the popular Lincoln Lawyer series and have been translated into over 36 languages; and Sue Grafton, whose “A” is for Alibi inaugurated one of the world’s best-known mystery series, (now up to “V” is for Vengeance). In order to explore and contextualize the enduring popularity of genre writing, The Dark Side will also feature acclaimed “literary” figures like John Banville, the Booker Prize-winning Irish author who pens crime-novel page-turners under the psuedonym Benjamin Black; former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins; and Percival Everett, whose novel Assumption turns the crime procedural on its head.

The Final Chapter is also expected to sell out well in advance of January, and we urge all who are interested to register as soon as possible. Registration fee is $575. This includes entry to all talks and panels, beginning Thursday evening and concluding Sunday around noon. Evening receptions and meals are also included. A $100 deposit is required, with the remainder due in the fall.

Faye’s love of her adopted city led her to research the origins of the New York City Police Department, the inception of which exactly coincided with the start of the Irish Potato Famine. Her second and third novels, The Gods of Gotham and its sequel Seven for a Secret, follow ex-bartender Timothy Wilde as he navigates the rapids of his violently turbulent city, his no less chaotic elder brother Valentine Wilde, and the perils of learning police work in a riotous and racially divided political landscape.

Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, Lyndsay migrated to Belmont, California and graduated from Notre Dame de Namur University with a dual degree in English and Performance.  She worked as a professional actress throughout the Bay Area for several years, nearly always in a corset,and if not a corset then at the very least heels and lined stockings.  As her roles ranged from Scrooge’s lost fiancée in A Christmas Carol to Lavinia DuPlessy in Andrew Lippa’s world premiere of A Little Princess, whalebone prevented her from drawing a natural breath for a number of years.  She is a soprano with a high pop belt, if it interests you.  Her performances were generally reviewed well, with adjectives ranging from “soaring” and “delightful” to“sausage-curled.”

Lyndsay and her husband Gabriel Lehner live just north of Harlem with their cats, Grendel and Prufrock.  During the few hours a day Lyndsay isn’t writing or editing, she is most often cooking, or sampling new kinds of microbrew, or thinking of ways to creatively mismatch her clothing.  She is a very proud member of Actor’s Equity Association, the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, the Baker Street Babes,the Baker Street Irregulars, Mystery Writers of America, and Girls Write Now.  She is hard at work on the third book in the Timothy Wilde series.

Online Resources

lyndsayfaye.com

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TKTK

She is a graduate of University of California in Riverside. She also attended California State University at Fullerton, where she was awarded a master’s degree in Counseling/Psychology and an honorary doctorate of humane letters

Professionally, she started out as a teacher. She was employed at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana initially, but there she gave in to her bent for organized labor and was summarily fired along with ten other teachers for union activity. She moved on to El Toro High School in El Toro, California (now called Lake Forest, California), where she remained for the rest of her career as high school English teacher. While employed there, she was selected Orange County Teacher of the Year, a tribute in part to the work she’d done with remedial students for nearly a decade. She left education after thirteen and a half years when she sold her first novel, A Great Deliverance, to her longtime publisher Bantam Books.

She has won the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award, and France’s Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere for her novel A Great Deliverance, for which she was also nominated for the Edgar and the Macavity Awards. She has also been awarded Germany’s MIMI for her novel Well-Schooled in Murder.

Most of her novels have been filmed for television by the BBC and have been broadcast in the US on PBS’s Mystery.

Elizabeth George currently lives on Whidbey Island in the state of Washington.

Online Resources

elizabethgeorgeonline.com

Selected Bibliography

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The subject of the Advanced Fiction Workshop is your own fiction. You will submit either a short story or the first chapter of a novel (mid-novel is a difficult subject for discussion) for the class which will be reviewed in detail during the workshop. You are expected to read the work of your fellow students and to give a written critical review. Considerations of craft (point of view, setting, character development, structure, etc.) will be generated by discussions of your work.

Requirements

For consideration, submit either a short story or the first chapter of a novel with your initial registration (maximum 20 pages). (This submission need not be the same work you choose to workshop and may have been previously published. If you are accepted into the workshop, a work-in-progress submission will be due no later than December 1.)

About Susan Richards Shreve

Susan Richards Shreve is the author of fourteen novels, most recently You Are the Love of my Life, published by W.W. Norton in the summer of 2012. A Student of Living Things was published in 2006 and a memoir, Warm Springs: Traces of Childhood, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2007. She has written twenty-nine books for children published primarily by Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic and Knopf. Her new children’s book The Lovely Shoes was published in June 2011 and The Save the Marriage Baby is forthcoming from Arthur A Levine/Scholastic.

Shreve is a Professor of English at George Mason University and is Co-Chairman of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She has received a Guggenheim Award for Fiction, a National Endowment grant for Fiction, the Jenny Moore Chair in Creative Writing at George Washington University and has won both the Grub Street Prize for non-fiction and the Service award from Poets and Writers. She has taught in the MFA at Columbia School of the Arts and for three years at Princeton University.

Susan R. Shreve

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This workshop will explore the many possibilities of creative nonfiction, an “equal opportunity” genre suited to poets and fiction writers alike. After locating our subject(s) or series of linked ideas, we will talk about how best to shape our work. Since structure tends to be a major consideration in this genre, we’ll look at how using segmentation, “braiding,” and “mosaics” (in which separate memories, meditations, observations, and images work separately yet together toward an accumulated whole) can sustain and guide our voices and creative projects. For those participants interested in or already underway with longer projects, we can also go over strategies for developing and structuring book-length manuscripts. We will discuss some of the main elements of creative nonfiction, such as narrative, voice, language, and metaphor. We will also talk about memory, subjectivity, and perspective, and how to turn our experiences and ideas into beautiful and meaningful prose.

Requirements

This workshop will involve writing new work and is open to all levels.

About Bich Minh Nguyen

Bich Minh Nguyen (first name pronounced “Bic”) is the author of the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (Viking Penguin), which received the PEN/Jerard Award and was named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the year; and the novel Short Girls (Viking Penguin), which received an American Book Award. Her next book, the novel Little Gray House in the West, is forthcoming. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and currently teaches creative nonfiction and fiction writing in the MFA Program at Purdue University.

Bich Minh Nguyen

Exploring Creative Nonfiction
January 12–16, 2014
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Character is the foundation of most of the finest stories and novels. Even in developing other elements of fiction—point of view, dialogue, plot, setting, theme—all roads run through character. E.M. Forster wrote that a character in a book is real “when the [writer] knows everything about it. He may not choose to tell us all he knows … but he will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life.” In this workshop we’ll develop characters from the ground up, sketching out their particular habits, guises, desires, fears, and impediments, reading examples of portrait stories by writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Edwidge Danticat, and Tobias Wolff. Then we’ll workshop a scene or sequence of scenes in which an action takes place, a character pursues a desire or motive, and toward the end a recognition occurs on the part of the reader, the character or both.

Requirements

This workshop is open to writers of all levels of ability. Workshop members may send up to ten pages in advance or plan to generate new work.

About Porter Shreve

Porter Shreve is the author of three novels, all with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: The Obituary Writer was a New York Times Notable Book and Drives Like a Dream and When the White House Was Ours were both Chicago Tribune Best Books of the Year. He is co-editor of six anthologies, and his book reviews, nonfiction, op-eds, and short stories have appeared in Witness, Salon, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe and the New York Times. He has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and is now Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Purdue University.

Porter Shreve

Writing is Character Building
January 12–16, 2014
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At the heart of memoir is a conundrum: while writing about the most subjective of experiences, your own life, you have to find the most objective of frameworks. Consider how a simple list of the names of your childhood friends might be enough to move you to tears, but that won’t work for readers. Readers need you to supply context, physical description, character sketches, dramatic scenes, the whole range of verbal wizardry, if they are to come close to feeling as you do about your material. “You have to take pains,” as Key West’s Annie Dillard has observed, “in a memoir not to hang on the reader’s arm, like a drunk, and say, ‘And then I did this and it was so interesting.’” In our time together, we will work on the ways to make what is compelling to us about the lives we have led compelling to others. We will try to find what Vivian Gornick called “the situation in our story”—the meaning, the wisdom.

Requirements

This workshop is open to writers of all levels. Participants should prepare to submit between ten and fifteen double-spaced pages of a work in progress to share with the group. These will be distributed on Sunday evening before the first formal class meeting.

Blais notes: “I will be distributing handouts during our time together, but if you can read or at least acquaint yourself with Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (preferably the most recent “restored” edition) and Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life it will go a long way toward creating a shared critical vocabulary. We will also use Key West itself as a writing lab. We won’t be the first: Elizabeth Bishop, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and many others found inspiration in the Last Resort, and if it was good enough for them, it’s surely good enough for us.”

About Madeleine Blais

Madeleine Blais worked as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Miami Herald and is the author of three books which include Uphill Walkers, a family memoir and winner of a Massachusetts Book Award; and In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle, which ESPN cited as one of the top one hundred sports books in the twentieth century. Blais teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and has served as guest faculty in the Goucher College MFA program in Creative Nonfiction and has been a visiting writer at Florida International University’s Creative Writing Program. As a freelancer, she has been at various times a contributing writer to the magazines at the New York Times and the Washington Post, a guest columnist at the Boston Globe, and a book critic for the Chicago Tribune. She loves Florida and memoir (either order) and is currently working on a book about Miami in the 1980s when it was known as the most dangerous place on earth.

Madeleine Blais

Personal Narrative in an Impersonal World
January 12–16, 2014
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January 12–16, 2014
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For this workshop we’ll be trying out counterintuitive means of writing poetry. You’ll be encouraged to do what amounts to doing something, somewhere along the line, someone (including yourself), it doesn’t matter who, has indicated to you you shouldn’t be doing. Let’s say you’ll be trying to over-use an egocentric, narcissistic narrator—let them talk. Another time you’ll want to be as bombastic as possible. Another time you will want to make absolutely no sense at all. None. You get the drift. Clichés, sentimentality, stereotypes, heavy-handedness, boring logic, spastic rhythm, unbalanced development, inappropriate nomenclature, over-writing, under-writing, deadpan rhyme, awkward syntax, ridiculous sentences, irrationally unproductive combinations, predictable scenarios, boundlessly trite didacticism, impenetrable dogma, superficial psychological pretensions, unapologetically unnecessary mendacities, relentless repetitions, dogged shallowness, unrepentant, irredeemable plagiarism, precious pretentiousness, predictability—all these things are for you to explore with abandon. We will see what results and we’ll have a good time talking about why and how and when these things are sometimes the very things writing needs and you can employ.

Requirements

This workshop is open to poets at all levels of abilities with no entrance requirements. Dara invites anyone to use their imaginations with courage, with energetic recklessness, and with exquisitely necessary sincerity, with no self-censoring and no pre-established inhibitions, to find the poet’s true voice and style.

About Dara Wier

Dara Wier’s newest book, out in April 2013, from Wave Books, is You Good Thing, a sequence of sonnets meditatively regarding, grief, loss, and love. Among her other books from Wave are Reverse Rapture and Voyages in English. She teaches poetry workshops and seminars for the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA program for poets and writers. She’s a member of the arts space Flying Object, an editor for Factory Hollow Press, and co-founder and co-director of the Juniper Initiative and Summer Writing Institute of U.M. Amherst. Awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, The American Poetry Review, The San Francisco Poetry Center, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council have supported her work.

Dara Wier

The Counterintuitive Poetry Workshop
January 12–16, 2014
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Dara Wier

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January 12–16, 2014
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This workshop is designed to help poets, from beginners to the more advanced, move forward in their creative process. Helping poets take “the next step” is the overall goal of this workshop; however, individual poets will identify what “the next step” signifies for them. Some might want to create stronger images and better line breaks, while for others it could mean achieving more tension in a poem, or creating a layered narrative. There may be others who are not sure how to define this next step, but are sure they want to get there. The common denominator is the poets’ desire to write better poems by using the practice of writing itself.

During this workshop, poets will write first drafts of poems using various prompts, some inspired by the participants themselves. Poets will read their drafts aloud and the group will comment on each poem in order to identify what is working in these first drafts. The focus is on the PRACTICE: the excitement of taking the risk to write something new, and possibly breaking through to “the next step.”

Requirements

This workshop is open to all levels. You will be expected to bring with you to the workshop in January the most recent poem you’ve written.

About E.J. Miller Laino

Coming soon…

E.J. Miller Laino

Poetry Workshop
January 12–16, 2014
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E.J. Miller Laino

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