“A” Term August 2016 Classes

UVA has its “J” term, the intensive January mini-semester in which students can make up class credits and add to their graduation requirements. This summer, WriterHouse is hosting an “A” term, a mini-semester in the first week of August that offers our students the opportunity to get a writing “super boost” in just one week so that vacations, childcare, and all the other joys of summer can be navigated more easily to include writing opportunities.

Course Selection:

Crowdfunding for Authors
Instructor: Bethany Joy Carlson
Cost: $60 Members | $65 Non-members
Saturday, August 06, 2016 | 9:30 AM-1:30 PM

Over 70% of publishing projects fail on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but authors can crowdfund their books. Learn how from Bethany Carlson, owner of The Artist’s Partner, where writers’ success rate is over 98%. From planning a communication strategy, to shooting a video, to marketing techniques, Bethany will go over the steps that have led to over $70,000 raised for books (including for Festival of the Book authors Stefan Bechtel, Bob Perry, Mary Buford Hitz, Marc Boston, Carolyn O’Neal, Zack Bonnie, and Katherine McNamara). To specifically workshop your book’s crowdfunding campaign, please fill in her questionnaire at https://theartistspartner.com/fill-out-our-artist-questionnaire-for-a-free-consultation/ before the session.

Sea Lanes Out: Traveling the Paths of Poetry
Instructor: Jasmine Bailey
Cost: $139 Members | $147 Non-members
August 01 -August 05, 2016 | 10:00 AM-12:30 PM

In this week-long intensive session designed to deepen and broaden the skills of practicing writers, we will read and discuss poetry by masters well-known and new to you, play with writing prompts, engage in the world outside of the studio, and read and workshop one another’s poems. Major themes we will discuss are political and protest poetry, poetry of place, love poetry, nature and environmental poetry, and form. We will rely on one another’s interests to guide the directions our readings, workshops, and prompts take. Poets whose work we will read will include Pablo Neruda, Li-Young Lee, Terrence Hayes, Richard Hugo, and Anna Akhmatova. Exercises we may explore are multi-media ekphrasis (writing poems that take their cue from other art forms), forms such as the villanelle, and translation of poems from English into English (think Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound). Requirements for this workshop are having completed a previous class at the Writer House or a submission of 3-5 poems.

Plot your Novel with Screenwriting Techniques
Instructor: Meredith Cole
Members: $40 Nonmembers: $50
Wednesday, August 3, 6:00 PM-8:30 PM

Learn some tips and tricks from screenwriting to help your novel stay on track and keep your reader turning the pages to find out what is going to happen next.

 

How to Cultivate a Cliché Allergy
Date: Tuesday, August 2, 6:00 PM-8:00 PM
Instructor: Brady Earnhardt
Cost: $40 Members | $50 Nonmembers

cliché: “I’ll be Juliet, you be Romeo.”
better: “I’ll be Francesca, you be Paolo.”
still better: “I’ll be a Coleman lamp, you be the sound of pages turning.”

Dealing with clichés is a fundamental issue for creative writers, because our use or avoidance of them has such a great impact on the way people receive our work. In this workshop we’ll be talking about what defines them, their effect, what forms they take, and how to transcend them. We’ll be looking at and generating examples, discussing strategies, and playing some serious writing games.

Writing Small Action: Characterization through Facial Expression, Body Language, and Gesture
Instructor: Kristie Smeltzer
Tuesday, August 2, 2016, 6:00 PM-8:00 PM
Cost: $40 Members | $50 Non-members

This seminar focuses on characterization and showing of small action—namely those important non-verbal cues we give each other constantly that enhance the meaning of what we say and do. We’ll read examples of successful small action descriptions, practice intentional observation of each other to capture those characterizing details, and discuss how and when to use these techniques to enhance your fiction or creative nonfiction.

The Narrative Moment: When/Where to Start Your Story
Instructor: Kristie Smeltzer
Thursday, August 4, 2016, 6:00 PM-8:00 PM
Cost: $40 Members | $50 Non-members

This seminar is all about timing. Where a story begins—whether it be a short story, novel, or creative nonfiction work, determines whether you grab your readers attention. We’ll look at a series of successful beginnings and look at commonalities. Seminar discussion with center on what the narrative moment is and how writers choose wisely when and where to begin.

Introduction to Scrivener
Instructor: Matt Procino
NOTE: THIS SEMINAR IS FREE FOR ANY CURRENT MEMBER ON A FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED BASIS.

Scrivener writing software was designed to provide authors with a single, inexpensive ($45) program for storing research, organizing, writing, and publishing written works. If you are trying to write a novel, screen play, or nonfiction with MS Word, you’re missing out! In this 90-minute seminar, we’ll discuss Scrivener’s handy templates, cork board feature, its clever organizing system, and best of all, its ability to output your work into .epub, .mobi (Kindle), PDF, .doc and .docx, rtf, txt (among many other) formats.

Members- email programs@writerhouse.org to sign up for free!

Forged in Fire: Writing in Response to Cancer
A Seminar for Patients, Survivors, and Caregivers
Instructors: Cora Schenberg and Carolyn O’Neal
Sunday, August 7, 1:00 PM-3:00 PM
Cost: $40 Members | $50 Non-members

Cancer may be viewed as an embodiment of chaos. When it strikes, it wreaks havoc on our lives and those of our loved ones. In contrast, writing gives us the chance to create order, in the form of stories, poems, blogs, journal entries, etc. Cora Schenberg and Carolyn O’Neal, writers and cancer survivors, offer a two-hour seminar designed to help patients, survivors, and caregivers respond to cancer through writing. In-class writing exercises will be combined with reading of work by well-known and less well-known survivors. This coming Fall, the instructors will offer an eight-week workshop, which will give participants the chance to try varied types of writing while reading from the wide body of literature by survivors.