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| And yes, it really looks like this at Anam Cara |
My dear friend, Geraldine Mills, is an award winning poet, short story writer, as well as a children's book author. I've known Ger for more than a decade and have had the pleasure of teaching with her at the Richard Hugo House. We've also read together at Elliott Bay Books, mountaintops and an Irish bell tower. This September she's giving a week long workshop at Anam Cara and I think you should go.
You will have a week to write in an intimate setting with a superb instructor. There's also home-cooked meals, a hot tub, and wonderful walks to the beach. I've taught here as well and know that everything is in place so that you can focus on classes in the morning and writing in the afternoon.
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| A superb teacher and writer: Geraldine Mills |
Here's her description of her workshop:
Whose story is it
anyway?
I am delighted to be facilitating a
week-long short story workshop from Saturday 5 to Saturday 12 September, 2015
in the stunning setting that is Anam Cara Writers’ Retreat Centre on the Beara
peninsula in west Cork, Ireland.
By its very
nature, the literary short story is character-driven. It is about landing your
protagonists in a predicament and watching how they will free themselves from
it. What happens to them as the story progresses depends solely on what you
discover about them as you go along, how you bring them and your readers from a
state of ignorance to a state of awareness.
Each
day a different element will be explored in order to build on the previous
lesson that will support you in completing a draft of your story to include:
· Beginnings: How to grab your reader
by the throat.
· Whose story is it anyway?
· Characters: What makes them breathe?
· Dialogue: What role does it play, if
any? How does it move the story along?
· Epiphany, endings: As important as
beginnings. Does every word earn its place on the page?
·
Using various prompts
to liberate ideas, each morning session will explore one of the above elements
as well as in-class exercises. Afternoons will include one-to-one sessions and
review of work.
Day by day, you will add to your
previous learning experience, rewriting where necessary to fill out the
narrative, thus moving the story forward. As a writer it is crucial to know
these elements and in rewriting, ascertain which areas work and which do not;
to learn the importance of layering; to know the pulse of a story. By the end of the week you will have
produced a story full of craft and risk-taking.
Geraldine
Mills Biographical Note
Geraldine
Mills is a poet and short fiction writer. She has had two collections of poetry
published by Bradshaw Books, Unearthing
your Own (2001) and Toil the Dark
Harvest (2004) Arlen House has published her short story collections Lick of the Lizard (2005) and The Weight of Feathers (2007) for which
she was awarded an Arts Council Bursary.
She is a recipient of a Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for her third
poetry collection An Urgency of Stars
published by Arlen House in 2010. Her most recent short story collection Hellkite was published by Arlen House in
2014.
She has won
numerous awards for her fiction, including the OKI Award, the Moore Medallion
and the RTÉ Guide/Penguin Short Story Competition. She has been a finalist in the William Trevor Short Story
Competition and has been shortlisted six times for the Francis MacManus Short
Story Competition. She was the Millennium winner of the Hennessy/Tribune
Emerging Fiction Award and the overall winner of the New Irish Writer Award for
her story ‘Lick of the Lizard’.
In 2011 she
toured the United States where she launched a poetry collaboration with New
England poet, Lisa C. Taylor, titled ‘The
Other Side of Longing (Arlen House 2011) and presented the prestigious
Gerson Reading at the University of Connecticut. Her short story collections
have been taught at the University of Connecticut and Eastern Connecticut State
University.
She is a
fiction mentor with NUI Galway and is an online tutor in the short story with
Creative Writing Ink. The Arts Council awarded her a second bursary in
September 2014 to work on short fiction. Her first children’s novel Gold will be published by Little Island
in 2106.
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