"I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive." —Susan Sontag
For many of us it is easy to pour out our first drafts, the most overwhelming part comes next—revising. Line-by-line, scene-by-scene,paragraph-by-paragraph, radical revision is a way of walking around your story taking small risks, taking large risks, drawing closer and closer to the heart of your intent. Join us for some practical advice and a set of tools to grapple revision. Writers of fiction and nonfiction are welcome. We will begin with a series of writing exercises and questions designed to help you deeply revise and take your work to its next best level. Come with a story or essay that you’d like to revise.
This class will be followed by a reading from Visiting Writer Crystal Wilkinson.
Crystal Wilkinson, a Rockefeller Foundation United States Artist Fellow, is the award-winning author of The Birds of Opulence (winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence), Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. Nominated for the John Dos Passos Award, the Orange Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, she has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and others. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Associate Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.
Crystal Wilkinson is new to The Porch. Welcome!
