Find Your Love
A Virtual – Cross Genre Creative Writing Workshop
A common piece of writing advice is to write what you know. But is that really the best approach? The author Peter Ho Davies offers us an alternative. While Davies believes that write what you know has value as advice, he believes a better focus might be on how we come to know what we know, which is through a process of revision. “Early drafts,” he writes, “might be phrased ‘Write to know.’” Revision: “Revise to know more.” And the final draft: “I’ve written what I now know.”
This open-genre, generative workshop will explore these three ideas, with the end goal of transforming our creative process and finding our love—our capacity to be present in the world and write with curiosity and openness. Participants are encouraged to bring a short piece of writing with them, but the larger focus of the workshop will be on generating new material. Coalescing around texts from Kim Addonizio, Lydia Davis, Mary Ruefle, George Saunders and others, we’ll consider what it takes to move our process into wider terrains. Through daily writing prompts, craft lessons, discussion and feedback, participants should leave the workshop with fresh inspiration and a body of work they can continue getting to know.
Eliot Treichel is a writer, runner, and river enthusiast. His work includes the young adult novel A Series of Small Maneuvers and the story collection Close Is Fine. A past Fishtrap Fellow, he is also the recipient of the Reading the West Award, the Oregon Book Awards Readers’ Choice Award, and the Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award. Originally from Wisconsin, he now lives in La Grande, Oregon, where he is an Assistant Professor of English/Writing at Eastern Oregon University.
Learn more: eliottreichel.com