Tunnel Vision
In this cross-genre (fiction/nonfiction) workshop we’ll explore our interests and obsessions and work toward weaving these fixations and passions into and through our writing. We’ll investigate, examine, and mine the mundane and the mysterious, and particularly the mysteries in the mundane. Whether it be work, play, landscape, or artifact, we’ll employ that which pulls, puzzles, pleasures, or nags to find new and lasting channels and avenues into our work. Touchstones are true, few, and precious, yet provide the source and sustenance for a lifetime of creating. We’ll look at stories, essays, and excerpts by writers including Sarah Vowell, Roxanne Gay, Nick Hornby, David James Duncan, Thomas McGuane, and Annick Smith. Daily prompts and exercises will spark fresh starts and add fuel to works in progress.
Robert Stubblefield has published fiction and personal essays in Dreamers and Desperadoes: Contemporary Short Fiction of the American West, Best Stories of the American West, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Left Bank, The Clackamas Literary Review, Cascadia Times, Oregon Humanities, Oregon Salmon: Essays on the State of the Fish at the Turn of the Millennium, Open Spaces, basalt, Southern Humanities Review, Whitefish Review, and High Desert Journal among others. Awards include a Georges and Anne Borchardt scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Fishtrap Fellowship, and Imhaha Writers’ Retreat Fellowship. Robert grew up in Eastern Oregon and now lives in Missoula, Montana and teaches at the University of Montana.