Only Connect: or What’s Love Got to Do With It?
A Creative Writing Workshop in Fiction
Love is a many splendored thing. All you need is love. Puppy love. Labor of love. All’s fair in love and war. Love is everywhere, and yet we are living in the Eremozoic, meaning “The Age of Loneliness.” The worries of the world are vast, and from this, writers make art and speak to beauty in the world. How do we find hope in this age? Love? Connection? In this class, we’ll try and do just that. With love as the foundation, we will write about love in its prismed vastness and many forms – from romantic love, love of place, family love, to even love of animals. We’ll examine what impact we can make with our words and try our hands at writing through this dimness with awareness, hope, and love.
Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. In 2019-2020, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others. Her play based on Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and will be premiering in February 2024 at the Colorado New Play Summit, and her new essay collection will be published by the University of Georgia in 2025. She teaches at Colorado State University.
Learn more: ninamcconigley.com