2024 After Lunch Walk-In Seminars

After Lunch Walk-in Seminars – Front Room of the Lodge – 1 pm to about 2 pm.

Monday: You Fill Up My Senses - Jeff Campbell

In this craft-focused seminar, we’ll playfully give ourselves over to our senses—moving, tasting, smelling, touching, listening, looking—and explore the vividness, immediacy, and poetry of sensory language. 

Jeff Campbell is teaching “Creative Nonfiction: Not Playing by the Rules” at Fall Writerfest this year.

 

Tuesday: Love at First Line - Hollis Seamon

After the first paragraph—or maybe only the first line—of your novel, short story, memoir, creative nonfiction, or poem, are your readers well and truly hooked?  Engaged? Enchanted? Excited about forming a long-term reader/writer relationship?  Or are they already moving on to more alluring prospects?  Readers, including editors and agents, often report that they give no more than a few seconds to a piece of writing before deciding to reject it or to commit and read on, to see what possibilities it holds.  So how do you inspire instant attraction to your work? In this seminar, we’ll take a look at brilliant opening lines and discuss strategies for creating them. Bring a piece of your writing, ready to brighten its beginning.

Hollis Seamon, the author of two novels and two short story collections, is Professor Emerita at the College of Saint Rose in Albany and taught for the MFA in Creative Writing Program of Fairfield University.  She’s a Fiction Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts and lives in Kinderhook NY.

Wednesday: What is This Thing Called Poetry? - Ellie O’Leary

Do you attend writing programs, but shy away from the poetry offerings? Do you think those are for other people? I did. We’ll discuss what makes something a poem. Is it the way it appears on the page? What are the necessary elements? Metaphor, rhythm, line breaks? What is the difference between free verse and formal verse? We’ll discuss how writing poetry can enhance your other writing.

Ellie O'Leary, co-facilitator of Fall Writerfest, is the Poet Laureate Emerita of Amesbury, Massachusetts and the Education Director of the Gloucester Writers Center. She has published Breathe Here (poetry, 2020) and Up Home Again (memoir, 2023) both with North Country Press.

Thursday:  Jumpin’ Jack Flash! It’s a gas, gas, gas! - Suzanne Strempek Shea

The flash form is a whole lot of fun and you’re invited to jump on in! This combo of lecture and
mini-generative experience will be a primer on flash fiction, flash creative nonfiction, flash
scriptwriting and flash prose poetry. How do you write compelling lyrical prose or a complete narrative within a few hundred words, or even far less than that? That, and more, will be covered in this brief lecture on a short but big form.

Suzanne Strempek Shea is teaching “Do I Know You?” at Fall Writerfest this year.