Fiction Workshop
FULL/WAIT LIST ONLY
That was the Workshop that Changed My Life: Looking Forward in Fiction
with Bill Roorbach
Simply put, this will be the best fiction workshop ever offered in the history of the world. By far! We will generate concrete, written plans for either story collections or novels to be written in the two years following our weekend. We will be using (but not strictly enforcing) the Hadley Hemingway method, in which you pack all of your past work, every word, in a suitcase and leave it on a train never to be seen again. This seeming loss will point us forward, with, of course, no baggage. Be ready to work hard, laugh hard, cry in manageable amounts, and step into vast new territories equipped with shield and sword (provided).
I’ll be using specific prompts to elicit first paragraphs and tentative but red-hot synopses of about ten stories each or the first chapter and supernova explosive synopsis of a novel heretofore unimagined in this or any realm. Which you will write both in and out of class. For now we will forgo all talk of markets and agents and submission (we will never submit but triumph!), and I will teach you the secret of getting published. I will teach you this secret in the first few minutes of the workshop! And then we will get to work. No post-mortems on past work (which will have been lost on the train in any case, or perhaps published, same thing), but midwives attending auspicious births, one after the other.
To prepare for this wonderment please do everything you’ve already done to this point, both as a writer and as a person, but be ready to put it aside. Please bring the first sentences of a favorite story or novel by an admired writer to share. And get ready to discuss your future as a writer in conference with me, Bill Roorbach, the greatest teacher of creative writing in the history of the world—by far (and that includes all of Zoom and FaceTime, too).
Bill Roorbach’s newest book is Lucky Turtle, a novel, forthcoming from Algonquin Fall 2021. Also from Algonquin are The Girl of the Lake: Stories (2017), and the novels The Remedy for Love, one of six finalists for the 2015 Kirkus Fiction Prize, and the bestselling Life Among Giants, which won a Maine Literary Award in 2012. An earlier collection, Big Bend, won the Flannery O’Connor and O. Henry prizes in 2000. His memoir in nature, Temple Stream, recently released along with Into Woods in new paperback editions by Down East Books, won the Maine Literary Award in nonfiction 2005. Bill was a 2018 Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow, and is an NEA fellow (and NEA and PEN New England fiction judge), MacDowell fellow, and Furthermore Foundation Fellow. His craft book, Writing Life Stories, is used in writing programs around the world. Bill was on the graduate faculty at Ohio State and held the William H. P. Jenks Chair at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, and is now on the faculty of the low-residency Newport MFA. Short work, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Granta, Ecotone, New York Magazine, Playboy, and dozens more. Bill lives in Farmington and Scarborough with his family and writes full time. Visit billroorbach.com
Registration
Bill Roorbach’s workshop is full. Please email director@mainewriters.org to be added to the wait list.