Strong family ties, love for the land, poverty, opioid addiction: these are just a few of the contradictory (and superficial) images of rural life featured in pop culture.
This four-week class for fiction and memoir writers will invite participants to push the boundaries of these stock narratives and to compose authentic, nuanced stories of rural people and places. We’ll explore the works of Annie Proulx, Crystal Wilkinson, and Domingo Martinez, along with those of contemporary Tennessee authors Monic Ductan and Charles Dodd White. Through generative writing exercises, we’ll develop strategies for using settings as characters, honing our voices, and constructing compelling narratives rooted in specificity. By the end of the class, participants will have clearer voices and sharper storytelling skills, as well as several pages of fresh material for their story, essay, or memoir.
Whitney Bryant holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work is forthcoming in Shenandoah and has also appeared in The Georgia Review, One Story, and Chapter 16, and she is the fiction co-editor of the online journal Atlas + Alice: A Magazine of Intersections. In order to support her writing habit, she has taught literature and writing to high school students in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia over the past fifteen years. She has recently completed a novel in stories. She enjoys exploring Nashville's arts scene and outdoor activities.
"Whitney was the perfect blend of encourager and teacher! She is also so skilled in bringing a class together."
"Whitney was fantastic at adapting to all of the different story ideas everyone had. Our group had a wide variety of genres and experience levels and she deftly found a link between every one of them and what we happened to be discussing at the time."
"I really loved Whitney's class! We were constantly encouraged to lead with curiosity, which I'll take with me outside of my creative practice."
