Doug Rice just forwarded me the new information on the writing class he will be teaching this July in Fresno, at CSU Summer Arts.

Check out the Summer Arts website for more information on how to apply.

Imagining Home: Writing Narratives of Place

Too often, place—geographical location—is hurried past in contemporary writing. It is pushed off to the side of many narratives as if we inhabit a nowhere land void of specific details and experiences that call us into existence, that remind us of who we are. Students, in this class, will work on seeing, on strategies for avoiding the obvious and finding the more intimate, tactile details that we miss, the more provocative insights that we pass over in the blur of everyday living. Students will explore questions of home, of place, of being in the world and in the process of doing so they will enliven their ways for thinking of these issues, creating new understandings of home and of place in general.

Students will investigate the interrelationships between personal identity, place, natural history, social history, familial histories and so on. In the process of doing such work, students will learn the elements of the craft for the writing of place. We will focus on the precision of words, the vitality of metaphor, the narrative drive of storytelling, the poetics of the sentence, the balance between reflection and dramatized scenes, and other aspects of imaginative writing. Through vivid sensory and cerebral impressions, students will come to observations that will range far beyond the literal landscapes of place into worlds of metaphysical insights.

Who Should Apply:

All writers (of memoir, fiction, poetry and drama) interested in writing narrative that explore place—our homes real and imagined places that have fascinated us. This workshop is open to writers on a variety of levels from the intermediate to the advanced and who are passionate about finding new ways to write and explore ideas about place.

How To Apply:

Submit a letter of interest and three to five pages of recent writing (poetry, memoir, or fiction).
Check out the website for addressing.

Guest Artists:

Rebecca Brown
Rebecca Brown’s thirteenth book is a collection of gonzo essays called AMERICAN ROMANCES. Brown’s other titles include THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU, THE END OF YOUTH, THE DOGS, THE TERRIBLE GIRLS, EXCERPTS FROM A FAMILY MEDICAL DICTIONARY and THE GIFTS OF THE BODY. A frequent collaborator, she has written numerous texts for dance; a play, THE TOASTER; and WOMAN IN ILL FITTING WIG, a book length collaboration with painter Nancy Kiefer. Her work has been translated into Japanese German, Italian, Norwegian and Dutch. She recently co-edited, with Mary Jane Knecht, LOOKING TOGETHER, an anthology of writers’ responses to work at the Frye Art Museum. She lives in Seattle and teaches at the low residency MFA program at Goddard College in Vermont and elsewhere.

Robert Glück
Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including the two novels, Margery Kempe (1994) and Jack the Modernist (1995), a book of poems and short prose, Reader (1989), and a collection of stories, Denny Smith (2004). He lives in San Francisco and teaches at San Francisco State University, where he is an editor of the online journal Narrativity. In 2005, Coach House Press published Biting the Error: Writers on Narrative, an anthology edited by Glück, Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott.

Lance Olsen
Lance Olsen has written 18 books of and about innovative prose, including 10:01 (Chiasmus, 2005), Nietzsche’s Kisses (FC2, 2006), Anxious Pleasures (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007), and Rebel Yell: A Short Guide to Fiction Writing (Cambrian, 1998). He teaches at the University of Utah and serve as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America’s best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities. He is an associate editor at American Book Review and fiction editor at Western Humanities Review