Tuscany Writing Workshop

THE TUSCANY WRITING WORKSHOP

PAM HOUSTON

Saturday, July 17--Friday, July 30, 2004

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

My goal as workshop leader is to create an environment where writers become excited about taking both stylistic and emotional risks with their work. We will concern ourselves with what I consider to be the essential craft and artistry of fiction: the translation of the emotional landscape of a story onto its physical landscape, so that the reader may apprehend it deeply and fully, using their senses, as well as their minds.

We will be aiming for stories in which the language is always working in at least two ways at once, where metaphors dance between meanings like beads of water on a too hot grill. We will focus predominantly on structure, metaphor, image, voice, and the way we can use the physical landscape of a story to both access and convey its emotional landscape, the way we dip our ladles into the bottomless pot of metaphor soup and pull out what we need, what we can then shape into story.

We will begin the workshop with exercises that will set the theme for our time together: the way we take the details from the physical world that resonate for us and translate them into words and paragraphs that will help us access the beautiful and frightening stories we have to tell. We will learn to trust the way the physical world gives us the tools (and, incidentally, the courage) to tell our most profound truths. There will be plenty of amazing landscape all around us, and we will be seeing it with fresh eyes, the perfect situation for generating good writing.

We will talk about why writing is so hard, and why it should be, (it is art, after all), about ways to trick ourselves into getting and staying at the computer, about that wonderful moment where no matter how impossible it feels to begin a new story, it feels even more impossible not to. We will talk about the stories we have read in common, what makes them successful, and where they falter, if you feel they do. We will move from there into the manuscripts you brought with you, and end the workshop with a student reading, the highlight of the week for any teacher, and with a little luck we'll go home feeling refreshed, and far less alone in our pursuit of stories that are beautiful and true.

With a little luck we'll have a little fun while we are at it, and learn something about a place much different from the place that we call home.

The general flow of the day will be as follows: Breakfast will be taken early followed by group workshop until lunch. Afternoons are yours to work on your assignments and perhaps explore the surrounding area. There will be several private conferences, both scheduled and informal. Evenings we re-convene to discuss the day, attend readings and lectures followed by dinner and lively conversation.

Students should bring approximately 20 pages of fiction to be workshopped, as well as something approximately 15 minutes long to read at the student reading (though you may want to read something you generate there!) They should also read The Best American Short Stories of the Century, Houghton Mifflin, John Updike, edt. so that we have a common base of stories as a frame of reference during workshop. The most contemporary stories will be the most useful for us, so I recommend reading from the back of the book as far forward as Joyce Carol Oates.

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