Cultivating a Resilient Writing Practice – Fiction
This workshop will explore ways to strengthen, deepen, and (re)awaken our writing practice. How can we cultivate space for writing in our daily lives, even when we are handling multiple claims on our energy and time (caring for others, working long hours, etc.)? How can our fiction-making welcome doubt, mystery, instability, and the unexpected? We’ll immerse ourselves in a range of writing prompts, experiments, and conversations. In addition to generating and sharing new writing, we’ll look at published texts that may inspire our own inventions and support our artistic resilience.
Leni Zumas won the 2019 Oregon Book Award for her national bestselling novel Red Clocks, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Neukom Prize for Speculative Fiction. Red Clocks was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and was named a Best Book of 2018 by The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and the New York Public Library. Zumas is also the author of Farewell Navigator: Stories and the novel The Listeners. She lives near Portland, Oregon, and directs the MFA program at Portland State University.