9 Wednesdays, January 18 – March 15, 7-9:30pm
$445 members/$475 non-members
Testimonials for Cary
*This course is designed for those who are serious about improving their writing through an understanding of craft, with an eye toward publication and applying to MFA programs.
Fiction writing engages our hearts, challenges our minds, and helps us connect with our own inner lives and those of our readers. It’s also an excellent way to have fun. This workshop will create a common ground for participants to discover more about their interests as writers, to mentor each other, and to improve at this most ineffable of crafts.
We’ll begin with exercises and homework assignments designed to free the imagination and encourage exploration. We’ll discuss each other’s assignments, then segue gently into more structured work incorporating foundational aspects of fiction that include character, point of view, motivation, conflict, and dialogue.
Because few things are more humbling, or enlightening, than sampling masters of the trade, we’ll also read published stories and discuss them in the context of these craft considerations. By the end of the course, participants will have written several exercises and completed one story, short or long.
“Good writing is about empathy—how writers understand their characters and how the reader comes to share that understanding,” says instructor Cary Groner. “This course is designed to develop that empathy through exercises and assignments, then strengthen the writer’s craft through drafting and revision of a story.”
Cary Groner’s debut novel, Exiles (Spiegel & Grau / Random House), was a Chicago Tribune best book of 2011. His short stories have won numerous awards, including the Glimmer Train fiction open, and appeared there and in other venues that include American Fiction, Mississippi Review, Southern California Review, Sycamore Review, Tampa Review, Zymbol, and Salamander. Cary earned his MFA in 2009 from the University of Arizona, where he also taught undergraduate fiction writing. His students have been accepted at several prestigious MFA programs, including the University of Texas’s Michener Center, Johns Hopkins, the University of Tampa, and Antioch.