A Generative Workshop with Pam Houston:
You may also want to know . . .
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Monday September 23, 2019 at 7pm - Pam will be reading from Deep Creek Finding Hope In The High Country at Four Seasons Books at 114 W. German St., Shepherdstown, WV
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Other Pam Houston events can be found by clicking here.
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The Physical Stuff of Your Life (and how to use it to gain access to the emotional stuff)
This will be a generative workshop in which we focus on all the ways the sensory details that surround us—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures—can give us access to that much more elusive interior landscape we are always trying to access when we write. If we write those details all the way down to the bone. If we sit in the dark with them and let them distill up from the swamps of memory. We will focus on what I believe to be the real artistry of prose writing: the way we dip our ladles into the bottomless pot of metaphor soup of our lived and witnessed experience and pull out what we need; the way we pick up hunks of the physical world and bring them back to the page, translated into language. We will be aiming for work in which the language is always working in at least two ways at once, where metaphors dance between meanings like beads of water on a too hot grill. We will work toward demystifying some of the essential components of prose writing (image, metaphor, structure, dialogue, character, scene, among others) and turning them into comprehensible tools that are at our disposal. We will all, no doubt, be humbled in the face of languages unlimited possibility as well as its limitation. At the same time we will honor (and hope for) the inexplicable flights of creativity (and madness?) that take a good story and make it great.
Please come armed with pen, paper, or laptop, your vast memory banks, your active and engaged senses, and all the things you don’t even know you know.
Pam Houston is the author of the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, as well as two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton.
Her stories have been selected for volumes of The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Short Stories of the Century among other anthologies. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award and several teaching awards.
She teaches in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is Professor of English at UC Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
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(photo by Mike Blakeman)
Get in Touch
For inquiries about events on this site contact us at:
Kelly at 571-205-5737
Sponsors
Working Together
Evolve Shepherdstown
Evolve Shepherdstown LLC provides a opportunity for artists and entrepreneurs to expand their visibility in hip and historic Shepherdstown, WV.
It is a pop-up space started by two friends who met in 2012 during the celebration of Shepherdstown 250th anniversary. One is a native of the area and the other a transplant, but they share a love for the history of the town and it’s 21st century style.
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Evolve can be a space to cultivate new works and ideas – an incubator for creativity of all sorts:
an intimate space to perform a new song, show a film, have a meeting, teach a class, raise awareness, or honor a friend.
The Society For Creative Writing
The Society for Creative Writing aims to bring national and international poets, fiction, and non-fiction writers to Shepherd University in order to encourage literary dialogue in the community and to expose students to professionals in the writing field, thus giving them the opportunity to explore different ways in which writing can enrich their lives and help prepare them for the future, regardless of their career choice. The Society is partnering with the Shepherd University Foundation and the Shepherd Entrepreneurship and Research Corporation (SERC), a non-profit corporation at Shepherd University.
The Written Word Workshops
The Written Word Workshops was founded by Kelly Kowalski to promote book signings and workshops for authors, Kelly is a resident of the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. You can learn more about events sponsored by The Written Word Workshops by contacting us at TheWrittenWordWorkshop@gmail.com