Baptism by Fire: An Advanced Fiction Workshop (Jay Kauffman)

This class will meet in person for 8 sessions on Wednesdays from 6:00 PM-8:30 PM, March 26 through May 14th.

Description:

The goal of this workshop is to push you to a new level of professionalism and take you from a first draft to a submission-ready final draft. The workshop will be about quality, not quantity, as we adopt a more tough-minded, detailed approach. Since everyone is expected to have a certain level of experience, we will focus less on fundamentals and more on fine-tuning—from sentence level to overall structure. But perhaps the most crucial element of this workshop will be the emphasis on confronting some poignant, central theme in your life as an artist and how that impacts your writing. The point of this course is not simply to be proficient but to produce something genuine and important. Students interested in this class are asked to submit 2-3 pages of their work to the instructor for review prior to admission. Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis and are due no later than March 19; email your submission to programs@writerhouse.org.

About the Instructor:

Jay Kauffmann is a former international model, travel writer, and award-winning poet. He attended Brandeis and UC/Berkeley and holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has taught at Randolph College and the University of Virginia, and is currently English Chair at the Miller School of Albemarle. Author of The Mexican Messiah: a Novella and Stories (forthcoming from Cornerstone Press), he was runner up for the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize and nominee for a Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. His work has appeared in CutBank, Hunger Mountain Review, Prime Number, The Writer's Chronicle, upstreet, Mid-American Review, and other journals and anthologies.