Mary Morris

About:

Often in the best historical fiction, or the best fiction for that matter, the narrative unfolds from a specific event. In novels such as E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Don DeLillo's Underworld, and Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, this is the case. The goal of this workshop is to help you find that specific event in your own writing, be it a bit of family lore you wish to explore, a scene that is stuck in your imagination, or a historic moment that you cannot forget. The goal of this workshop is to help you move from the germ of an idea, into a scene, and to begin to develop that scene into a narrative with characters, storyline, voice. What is the event that starts your story in motion? What story do you want tell? Who will be telling it? I ask that students bring material of their own that they'd like to work on and share with the workshop. At the same time we will do exercises and explore what your material might be and/or how to find it. Was there a story your father told you when you were a child? Was there a historic event that shaped your life or the life of your family? Or was it just something you've read that's stayed with you? This workshop is about the craft of storytelling and also about helping the writer mine his or her own material.

Requirements:

Open to any interested student.

Biography:

Mary Morris's new novel, Revenge (PicadorUSA, 2005), is a riveting, psychologically complex story of female friendship, art, and obsession. When a young painter with a tale to tell becomes the neighbor of a world-class novelist with writer's block, they become both muse and menace to one another. Michael Cunningham has called Revenge "compelling and darkly beautiful." Anita Shreve writes "I loved it. The writing is superb, and the tension Morris creates between Andrea and Lorette keeps the reader anxious...a beautiful example of the thread of literary suspense." Born in Chicago in 1947, Morris moved East to go to college. Though she never returned to the Middle West, she often writes about the region and its tug. Morris likes the fact that there is more magnetism around the shores of Lake Michigan than the North Pole. She feels drawn there and feels an affinity for Midwestern writers such as Willa Cather and Mark Twain, who wrote their stories of the Middle West from afar.

In her first collection of short stories, Vanishing Animals & Other Stories, awarded the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters, Morris writes about childhood and adolescent memories. The Chicago Tribune called Morris "a marvelous storyteller- a budding Isaac Bashevis Singer, a young Doris Lessing, a talent to be watched and read." Morris's stories often deal with the tension between home and away. Travel is an important theme in many of the stories in her three collections, including Vanishing Animals, The Bus of Dreams, and The Lifeguard Stories. It is also a recurrent theme in her trilogy of travel memoirs, including the acclaimed Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone; Wall to Wall: from Beijing to Berlin by Rail; and Angels & Aliens: A Journey West. In her five novels, including The Waiting Room, The Night Sky (formerly published as A Mother's Love), and House Arrest, Morris writes of family, its difficulties and disappointments, its iron grip and necessity, and ultimately the comfort family can bring.

Whether writing fiction or non-fiction, Morris sees herself as a storyteller, weaving tales. A Japanese critic, referring to her non-fiction, once told Morris that she is not really a travel writer; rather she writes stories that take place during journeys.

Her many novels and story collections have been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese.

The recipient of many prizes and awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the George W. Perkins Fellowship at Princeton University, Morris is currently working on a generational family saga, set in Chicago, during the jazz age. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and daughter and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.