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02/25/10 |
         
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A SMALL INTENSIVE CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP IN QUIET ANDROS.
Workshop (June23rd to 28th) - Natalie Bakopoulos Writing is a solitary process. Yet, as writers, we also need a community of readers, not only to provide support but also to help us gain perspective on our own work and develop the skills necessary to bring work to completion. The Aegean Arts Circle on the island of Andros offers not only a supportive community but also the quiet time and peaceful, beautiful space necessary to do just that. The misleading thing about good writing is that it looks easy. Good prose and good writing seem effortless. But anyone who’s struggled with a story or novel, an essay or poem, knows that it’s nothing but easy. Thomas Mann said that writers are people for whom the act of writing is more difficult than it is for others. Because behind the veil of most good writing lie piles of discarded drafts and countless revisions; behind the scenes sits a writer struggling with an infinite number of choices. The writing workshop not only provides writers with an opportunity to receive feedback on their work, but also—and perhaps more importantly—trains writers to look closely and carefully at the choices other writers make. In this workshop, by discussing and closely examining elements of craft, we will examine the choices a writer faces at each stage of the drafting process. I hope both to focus on participants’ work-in-progress and to offer short exercises and prompts that will help the participants generate new work. I hope, at the end of the workshop, participants will not only leave with careful, thoughtful feedback on their own work but will also have gained some new approaches to and insights about the writing process.
Natalie Bakopoulos received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan, where she now teaches. She is completing her first novel, set in Athens, Greece, during the military dictatorship of 1967–1974. A portion of this novel-in-progress won an Avery and Jule Hopwood Award and a Platsis Prize for Work on the Greek Legacy, both administered through the University of Michigan. Her short fiction has recently appeared in Ninth Letter and Tin House and has twice been a finalist in Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers. She is a regular contributor to Fiction Writers Review (www.fictionwritersreview.com
ELISSA RAFFA: SEPT/OCT. CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP Aegean Arts Circle Workshop Leader (dates to be announced) Change, Develop, Transform: Improvisation for Prose Writers Prose writers make hundreds of choices each day: between scene and summary; observation and invention; image and sound; this word and that. Each one has his or her habits-choices that come most naturally and those that come with great struggle. In this workshop we will apply group and individual exercises to deepening the techniques each writer is best at and strengthening the ones he or she might tend to avoid. In particular we will explore how improvisational voice, movement, and written approaches borrowed from play writers and other theater artists can make prose come alive on the page. The workshop atmosphere will be respectful, experiential, and thought-provoking. My goal is to help strengthen and clarify each individual's writing voice and structural/stylistic choices. The workshop is designed for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction at all levels and all stages of project development-from those just mulling over an idea to those preparing a final draft. BIO FOR ELISSA RAFFA: Elissa Raffa holds an MFA in Creative and Professional Writing from the University of Minnesota, and has taught writing and theater arts to Young people and adults for many years. Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in several anthologies and literary magazines in the U.S., and her writing for the theater produced on several U.S. stages including the Walker Art Center. Her first novel, Freeing Vera, was published by the Permanent Press of Sag Harbor, New York in 2005. As a work-in-progress, Freeing Vera won fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Astraea Foundation, the University of Minnesota, Hedgebrook, and the Puffin Foundation. Ms. Raffa is also a high school chemistry teacher and Dean of Academic Programming at Minnesota Online High School. She lives most of each year in Greece and the remainder in the Twin Cities. She is currently working on Speech Acts, a new novel.
2010 Aegean Arts Circle Workshop Special Guest Adrianne Kalfopoulou Adrianne Kalfopoulou is a writer and teacher. She is the author of a poetry collection, Wild Greens, a finalist for the Red Hen Press first book award, and a memoir Broken Greek, a finalist for a Best Books USA News award in the Women’s Life Writing category. Her second poetry collection, Passion Maps, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2010, and her chapbook, Cumulus will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2009. She is the undergraduate programs director at Hellenic American University, where she teaches.
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This site was last updated 02/25/10
