Fiction/Poetry Workshop Information + Registration
Elevating Your Sentences & Moving Your Readers
A Workshop Exploring the Lenses of Fiction & Poetry
There are many reasons why so many poets deeply read novels and stories and so many fiction writers regularly read poems to help tune their prose. In this workshop, we will close read a small group of stories and poems as well as each other’s work. We’ll carefully consider how and where the language is working and where the heat can be turned up. We’ll move back and forth between the lenses of fiction and poetry and see how they complement each other. We’ll use exemplary contemporary work by writers like Ross Gay, Charles D'Ambrosio, Sarah Thankan Mathews, Ling Ma, and Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and more as touchstones to help us see how we can raise the stakes, raise the temperature, and raise the sentences and key moments to new heights.
This workshop will be team taught by MWPA’s own Gibson Fay-LeBlanc and Taryn Bowe.
+ SUBMIT Participants are asked to please submit in advance a fiction manuscript or (a story or novel excerpt) up to 5000 words OR 5-10 pages of poems. Email the manuscript no later than 9:00 a.m. on October 4 to director@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “FICTION-POETRY MSS.”
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, received the Vassar Miller Prize and was a featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. Gibson’s poems have appeared in magazines including The New Republic, Tin House, Orion, and Narrative Magazine. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Slice, Guernica, and the anthology, Breaking Bread. His second book of poems, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021.
Taryn Bowe’s short stories and essays have appeared in journals such as The Sewanee Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Boston Review, Joyland, Epoch, and Indiana Review. Her story "Camp Emeline" will appear in the Best American Short Stories 2023, edited by Min Jin Lee.
Registration
To register, click the button below. To read more about the prices and the room & board options for the Harvest Writers Retreat, please go to the Room + Board page.