Getting Back to Basics: The Fundamentals of Story
We tell stories every day. We tell them to one another, we tell them to ourselves. Stories are, in many ways, life’s true and only currency. They are the best bread, the richest wine. Stories can knock us flat, then pick us back up. Stories are the kind of news that matters right now, and a dozen years from now. In this generative workshop, intended for writers of fiction and nonfiction, we’ll do lots of reading and thinking and talking and writing as we work our way through the fundamentals of making story.
Joe Wilkins is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist, which also named the book one of only a handful of novels chosen for the 2019 Editor’s Choice list. Short-listed for the First Novel Award from The Center for Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, Fall Back Down When I Die won the 2020 High Plains Book Award and has been translated into French, Spanish, and Italian. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and four collections of poetry, including Thieve and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Wilkins grew up north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana and lives now with his family in western Oregon. He directs the creative writing program at Linfield University and is a member of the low-residency MFA faculty at Eastern Oregon University.