On Writing Home with Madeline Beach Carey

Course Summary:

This workshop is designed for people writing about their home country whilst living—or having lived—far from their place of birth or the place they call home.

Participants can be starting or fine-tuning prose projects including memoir, personal essay, or fiction.

Each participant should send up to 3,000 words to be workshopped, including a brief synopsis, to info@writerscentre.ie at least ten days before the start of the course. While workshopping participants’ texts, selected readings will be used to highlight craft issues such as setting, character development, dialogue, writing ‘from’ other languages, and the tension between individual and collective narratives.

Course Outline:

Participants are expected to read selected texts provided by the instructor and must also be willing to read and comment on their peers’ work. The workshop will be dynamic and interactive. Close, careful readings lead to more productive workshop sessions for all involved.

Each session will begin with a discussion of the assigned material from a dossier of texts about exile, emigration, and belonging. The second half of the class will be dedicated to workshopping students’ work. Each week there will also be time for short writing exercises, a chance to generate new material and experiment with form and voice.

Session 1: Political and Personal Histories (Chinua Achebe, Teju Cole, and Deborah Levy)

Session 2: Collective Re-imaginings (Claire Messud, Fae Myenne Ng, and Julie Otsuka)

Session 3: Magic and Memory: Writing the Family (Michael Ondaatje and Joseph O’Neill)

Session 4: Excavation and Precision (Edward Said)

Session 5: Internal and External Exiles (Mavis Gallant, Leila Aboulela, and William Trevor)

Session 6: Constructing Arrivals (Pietro di Donato)

Course Outcomes:

Upon completion of the workshop each student will have read and discussed canonical texts about exile and the emigrant experience. Students will have explored innovative and experimental ways to narrate both collective and individual experiences of trauma, migration, and exile. As a group you will have discussed, questioned, reimagined what it means to call any place home.

Students will receive line edits and detailed editorial suggestions from the instructor on the 3,000 words presented to the workshop as well as feedback from peers. The instructor will also send a personalised list for further reading to each student.

Madeline Beach Carey is the author of the story collection Les filles dels altres. Her work has appeared in Southword, Conjunctions, El Món d’Ahir, The Sultan’s Seal, Full Stop, The Momentist, and elsewhere. Carey has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Edward Albee Foundation, Faber Residency, Hawthornden Castle, Greywood Arts, and Ventspils House.

Madeline Carey worked for many years as a political speechwriter in Catalonia. Now she dedicates her time to other kinds of fictions.