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Sample Residency Presentations in Fiction

Stonecoast offers a uniquely rich residency curriculum of classes, panels, lectures, presentations and discussions, presented by Stonecoast faculty along with selected alumni, current students, and visiting writers. Presentations relate to all aspects of creative writing, from expert publishing advice to analysis of great fiction, from writing about race and class to punctuation, from writing about crime to balancing writing and family. Some presentations are cross-genre in nature, while others are specific to one genre. Here are some recent presentations focusing on issues in fiction.

Everybody's Squawkin' at Me:
How to Write Dialogue that, You Know, is Realistic but not, like, Boring

Aaron Hamburger

Dialogue in writing presents a difficult challenge to the writer. On the one hand, you want your characters' words to sound lifelike. On the other hand, if your characters' words are too lifelike, the result, ironically, is lifeless writing that drones on and on like a transcript of a really boring Congressional hearing. In this seminar,
we'll do close readings of a transcript of a real conversation, an edited transcript, and then some passages of dialogue in fiction to consider the following questions:

1. How much is too much when it comes to verisimilitude?
2. How can we as writers use speech patterns and types of speech to do
the work of characterization, plot, or even setting? In other words, how can each character's distinctive "squawk" create a story?
3. How can dialogue help us address that famous workshop dictum of "show, don't tell"?
4. How can dialogue reveal a character's values?

The required text for this presentation is Little Children by TomPerrotta. Please bring your copy with you.

Atmosphere as Plot and the Invisible Narrative of Atsiri Thammachoat

Jaed Muncharoen Coffin

This presentation will focus on the various and perhaps unfamiliar narrative tactics of one of Thailand's premier literary figures, Atsiri Thammachoat. We will examine short chapters of his most well known work, Of Time and Tide, and discuss how his identity-less and backstory-less narrator, his center-less and indeterminate plots, and his Buddhist cultural traditions create a uniquely atmospheric narrative. We will also consider the relevance of Of Time and Tide as a landmark work in the post-tourist narrative.

Required Reading:

Atsiri Thammachoat, trans. Michel Barang), Of Time and Tide

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

Suggested Reading:

Practical Books:

Judith Appelbaum, How to Get Happily Published

Writer’s Markets 2007

Elizabeth Lyon, The Sell Your Novel Toolkit

Pat Walsh, 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reason Why It Might

Inspiring Books:

Stephen King, On Writing

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Barbara Ueland, If You Want to Write

Noah Lukeman, The First Five Pages

Amusing/Entertaining Novels

Olivia Goldsmith, The Bestseller

James Michener, The Novel

Kathrin Perutz, Writing for Love and Money (an experimental novel)

The Erotic Pen: Writing, Seriously, About Sex

Elizabeth Searle

Fiction takes us inside the skins of our characters-- and what more fascinating time to slip into those skins than during our characters' most intimate and luminous experiences? This seminar is not about writing 'erotica' but about writing erotic scenes in character-driven literary or popular fiction. In the seminar, we will explore (through discussion and examples) the joys and frustrations, of attempting an honest vivid depiction of sexuality. Writers covered will include: James Salter, Maria Flook, Gustave Flaubert, Toni Morrison, Carole Maso, Steve Almond. Our reading will be Elizabeth Benedict's THE JOY OF WRITING SEX, which is full of excellent examples from a variety of writers and which offers fine advice not only about writing sex scenes but about writing in general. If inspired to do so, students are encouraged to bring to the seminar brief (under 1 page) examples of erotic writing they love.

Required Reading:
Elizabeth Benedict, The Joy of Writing Sex (paperback, Henry Holt, 2002). Read especially chapters 1-3

The Witness Of James Baldwin (Panel)
Alan Davis, Richard Hoffman, Crystal Williams, Baron Wormser

This panel discussion follows the screening, at the last residency, of the film, James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket. As an essayist, novelist, short story writer, and dramatist, James Baldwin not only chronicled his era, he responded to it, addressed it, and found there an abiding understanding of what it means to be human. Based upon this vision, he called upon Americans to achieve a just and compassionate society that, while within our reach, seems still to elude our grasp. Each of the panelists will approach Baldwin from both a literary perspective and as an example and inspiration.

Required Reading:
James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village” (essay)
James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues" (story)

Psychic Distance: Moving The Camera Lens In Fiction

Masha Hamilton

John Gardner coined the term psychic distance, a critical tool that, when used well, helps us increase dramatic tension in our fiction, up the ante and improve pacing. The question is, when and how do we use it? Psychic distance is not something that should remain static in the course of a short story or a novel. Otherwise, we risk writing that becomes either overheated or remote. This seminar will use the visual analogy of the camera lens to explore, through several novel and story excerpts, when we need to zoom in and how we accomplish that through words, as well as when we pull should pull back for an establishing wide shot.

Required Reading:

Laura Kasischke, The Life Before Her Eyes

Learning from Crime: A Fiction Craft Seminar

David Anthony Durham

There’s some great crime fiction being published today. And I don’t mean the old fashioned whodunit variety. Not “Murder, She Wrote. Not part-time PI’s that solve suburban dilemmas with the aid of their wily cats. No, I’m referring to the contemporary crime novel: part police procedural/part mystery, often hardboiled, always punctuated with moments of violence. These novels are generally not about who killed Miss Scarlet in the conservatory. They’re about the damaged, often complex individuals who chose crime, or crime-solving, as careers. They’re about the detrimental results of such choices and how the effects ripple through society. Many of these writers consistently sell hundreds of thousands of copies. They have loyal fan bases, get films made of their work, get published in foreign countries, and are often lauded by critics and by fellow writers. Some of them willfully bump up against the barriers between “genre” and “literary” fiction, squeezing the best out of both.

Is there anything in what they do that can inform writers working outside the crime genre? You bet. For example… James Lee Burke is a master of controlled lyricism, reminding us again and again that he can craft a sentence with the skill of a Pulitzer Prize nominated author (which he is) without slowing the pacing of his violent tales. On the other hand, George Pelecanos works wonders with his plainspoken, crystal clear language. Walter Moseley uses the framework of one thing – a crime investigation – to indirectly explore another thing – race in America. And many reviewers argue that writers like Denise Mina and Ian Rankin say more about urban life in their native Scotland than any of their “literary” peers.

Using a selection of accomplished contemporary crime novels as models, I’ll look at how the authors do what they do, focusing on the craft decisions that make them powerful. There’s a lot to learn from these professionals, lessons that are informative to anyone looking to challenge, educate, entertain and reward their readers (including those with no intention of having a body count in their work).

Required Reading:

James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road

Suggested Reading:

John Cheever, “The Five-Forty-Eight” from The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, also collected in The Stories of John Cheever, and anthologized in Points of View edited by James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny

Jhumpa Lahiri, “A Temporary Situation” from Interpreter of Maladies

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. The Story, “Winter Dreams,” was Fitzgerald’s study for Gatsby.

Art for Justice: Using Writing to Create Social Change

Jen Hodsdon (student moderator) Gary Lawless, Chiara Liberatore, Cathy Plourde

This panel discussion will explore some of the rewards and challenges that come from using writing as a transformative exercise to effect social change. Panelists’ experiences range from prison writing and work with homeless youth, veterans, and immigrant populations to theatrical performance on social justice issues and more. The panelists’ discussion will address some common issues in considering art-for-social-justice: personal and programmatic definitions and motivations of art-for-social-justice; reconciliation of aesthetic objections to work that is created by non-traditional populations; specifics about the projects that panelists have worked on; and, most importantly, some suggestions about how to get paid to do this work.

Seeing for Setting

Aaron Hamburger

Our first instinct as writers is to think of settings in purely visual terms. However, the way we experience a sense of place in life is much more complex than the things we see. Setting is also about the other four senses: taste, touch, smell, and hearing, as well as issues like the effects of money, cultural values, nature, time, and process.

In this class, we’ll take a close look at excerpts from White Noise by Don DeLillo, the story “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx, the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” by David Foster Wallace, and the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum to explore how a variety of authors use setting as an integral part of their stories. We’ll consider how setting is intimately involved in other elements of fiction, like plot and character. Then we’ll do some directed writing exercises to expand our skills at creating a lifelike sense of setting in our own fiction.

Suggested Readings:

Don DeLillo, White Noise (the first chapter)

Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain”

David Foster Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”

L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz (the first chapter)

Get Obsessed and Stay Obsessed

Lewis Robinson

What makes “a writing life”? In her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Adrienne Rich suggests the following: “To write poetry or fiction, or even to think well, is not to fantasize, or to put fantasies on paper. For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive. And a certain freedom of the mind is needed—freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment.” In this class, we will consider the challenges and rewards of dedicating a life to writing, paying special attention to the zeal of writers such as Rich, Steven King, Francine Prose, Anton Chekhov, Richard Yates, Monica Wood, and John Irving.

Suggested Readings:
Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters
Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
Stephen King, On Writing
Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates
Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence)

Opening Gambits

Elizabeth Searle

What makes for great first paragraphs and pages? How, in your all-important novel or story openings, do you seduce your reader, cause them to fall through the page? And then to turn the page? How have great writers like Virginia Woolf, James Salter, Joyce Carol Oates and Dennis Lehane handled the openings to their major works?

In a mix of lecture and discussion, we will explore together some effective fiction openings and determine their common factors. We will focus on novel openings but also discuss some stories. Then, in quick brainstorming in-class exercises, students will analyze their own most troublesome openings.

Students are asked to bring along (not to be read aloud) one of their own first pages. If inspired, they should also bring along (to be read aloud) one of their all-time favorite novel or story first lines.

Suggested Readings:

Douglas Bauer, The Stuff of Fiction, “Openings”

David Huddle, The Writing Habit; “Mystery and Method”

Debra Spark, Curious Attractions, “Beginnings and Endings”

I Want to Go to Town,

Life Writing: Documenting with a Daily Dose of Prose

Robert Gibbons

How does one establish a method of writing? A joyous habit that can be repeated daily? This class investigates how through multi-focusing the senses, harnessing internal drives, the desire to write can turn into a language documenting personal history. How can one turn city streets into secret rhythms of one’s lyric prose? Robert Gibbons discusses his hard-won method via examples of his own writing, and the agencies of other writers, including Kristeva, Proust, and Kerouac. Participants will have an opportunity to create paragraphs that encapsulate life, the gist of the moment.

University of Southern Maine