Nine Sundays, Jan. 22-March 18, 7-9:30 pm
$335 members/$365 others San Francisco
Testimonials for Josh
ATTENTION: THIS CLASS IS NOW FULL
NOTE: Josh also teaches a six-month (monthly meetings) “Fiction Workshop Continuation” for those who have already taken this workshop (once or more than once), and would like to keep going.
Aspiring writers usually wend their ways to this workshop because “life isn’t slowing down,” isn’t offering them the space or the time to work on their fiction. They want to write, or they tinker with two-pages and never get around to completing the piece, or they have ideas rollicking through their brains that haven’t, as of yet, made it to the page. But they all come to class with one common goal: they want to write a compelling story.
In this workshop-intensive course, every student will bring in stories (at least two) for their peers to discuss, critique, and deconstruct, in positive, nurturing ways. Everyone is here to learn, to improve, and the workshop environment is key for a writer to understand all aspects of story-telling. “Writers need readers,” says instructor Joshua Mohr. “We need other eyes to help us identify our story’s strengths. But just as important as praise is hearing what readers are not responding to. This is how we grow, hone a style and voice, and in the end, publish.”
The class will also emphasize revision tactics: how to take a flawed draft and renovate it. “Each student will complete an entire revision,” says Josh, “and will finish the course with a broader understanding of the hard work necessary to take a sloppy, first draft and turn it into literature.”
“I hadn’t discovered yet what I would later find was an iron law of composition for me: the exasperatingly slow search among the words I had already written for the words which were to come, and the necessity for continuous revision…” —William Gass
NOTE: Many students who have taken Junse Kim’s 5-week “Intro to Fiction” class will take this class next, and some people enroll in this class more than once because it’s a great way to keep the momentum going. Another “keep going” option is Josh’s “Fiction Continuation” workshop, which meets once a month for six months, instead of once a week for 9 weeks.
Joshua Mohr is the author of the novels Termite Parade, which was an Editors’ Choice on The New York Times Best Seller List, and Some Things that Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009. He has an MFA from the University of San Francisco and has published numerous short stories and essays in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, 7—7, the Bay Guardian, ZYZZYVA, The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown, among many others. His third novel, Damascus, will be published in October 2011.
http://www.joshuamohr.net/
