Workshop: Fiction
Lifting Up Your Reader’s Heart
Fiction with Brock Clarke
Even the greatest fiction writers sometimes have trouble reaching their readers. The fiction writer Flannery O’Connor admitted as much in her essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”: “I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.’’
This is a most wanted writerly medical procedure: to move someone else’s heart to the place where a writer can then lift it up.
In this workshop, attendees will read each other’s stories or novel excerpts with an eye toward perfecting exactly this kind of surgery. Participants will also talk about how to get their work out in the world, into the hands of agents, editors, and readers.
SUBMIT
After registering, participants in the fiction workshop are asked to submit a manuscript of up to 5,000-words by no later than 9:00 a.m. on April 23. Manuscripts may be complete short stories or excerpts from novels. Please email the manuscripts as attachments to director@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “CLARKE BLACK FLY MSS.” *Word files are preferred, but you may also send a PDF. Please note: there is no printing available at the retreat location.
Brock Clarke is the author of eight books of fiction, most recently the novel Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? (2019), and has won the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, and a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship. Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, Southern Review, The Believer, and the New England Review, and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He lives in Portland, Maine, and is the A. LeRoy Greason Chair of English and Creative Writing at Bowdoin College.