Registration is now open for WHQR’s Writers’ Workshop. The workshop will take place Saturday, March 23, 2019 from 9:00 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. at WHQR Studios. The workshop will include a morning meet & greet with coffee and light refreshments, a generative workshop by Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, lunch from Front Street Brewery, a roundtable discussion by Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams and Wiley Cash on The Path To Publication, and a generative workshop with Wiley Cash.
Full schedule and details below.
9:00 a.m. Meet and greet with coffee and light refreshments
9:30-11:30 a.m. Hannah's workshop
11:30 a.m. Lunch from Front Street Brewery
12:00-1:00 p.m. “The Path to Publication: Agents, Editors, and the Book Business”
1:30-3:30 p.m. Wiley's workshop
Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams “The Experimental and the Exquisite: A Generative Prose Workshop” 9:30-11:30 a.m.
The trick here is to astonish yourself, to outsmart and outwrite yourself. This workshop will provide you with ways to leap into ideas you didn’t know you had and deliver language you didn’t know you could. The exercises in this class will further equip you with methods for deepening and enriching your writing practice in the long term. Our generative focus may foster new starting points, or it may complicate and develop prose works already underway. We will explore how to incorporate lyricism and write beautiful sentences without endangering the unbreakable contract we have with our readers to tell the truth. This class is open to writers at all levels, with or without a current project.
Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams and Wiley Cash “The Path to Publication” 12:00-1:00 p.m.
This roundtable discussion will take place over lunch. Hannah and Wiley will share stories about querying agents, finding editors, and seeing their work in print. They will even share their agent query letters. This is an opportunity to ask questions about the publishing business and the path to becoming a professional writer.
Wiley Cash “Balancing the System of Your Story” 1:30-3:30 p.m.
When we create a story, we are creating a tiny universe that depends on balance and harmony in much the same way our universe depends on the same. In this generative workshop, we will be thinking about our stories as a solar system with craft elements like characters, plot, and setting existing as planets of various sizes that depend on one another’s gravity to find footing in the universe we have created. We will discuss ways to balance the gravitational pull a plot-heavy story has on character (and vice versa), and we will tackle the challenges of tracking the aimless drifting of the oft forgotten planets of our outer solar system: tone, theme, language, and rhythm. This class is open to writers at all levels, with or without a current project.
HANNAH DELA CRUZ ABRANS was awarded the Whiting Writers Award for her novella The Man Who Danced with Dolls and her memoir-in-progress The Following Sea. She has also received a Rona Jaffe National Literary Award and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. Her work has most recently appeared in the Oxford American, StoryQuarterly, Mayday Magazine, and The Southern Humanities Review, among others. Abrams currently teaches in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
WILEY CASH is a New York Times bestselling author. His novels have won the Southern Book Prize, the Sir Walter Raleigh Award, the Weatherford Award, and others, and they have been named notable books of the year by The New York Times, the American Library Association, and Library Journal. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Weymouth Center for the Arts, and the North Carolina Arts Council. He is the writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA Program.
