Booked Out: Online: Advanced: Flow and Overflow: Finding Fiction's Shape with Belinda McKeon

Starts: Thurs 5 Nov 2020
Time: 6.30 pm-8.30 pm
Duration: 6 weeks
Cost: €350/€315 members

Course Level: Advanced

**Please note that this course is most suitable for published writers who want to move forward with works in progress. Work will be workshopped with participants and feedback will be given by the writing facilitator.

How to apply:

You can apply by the normal process but as this course is likely to prove very popular, it is advisable to book your place early on. Novels in progress and stories are both welcome to be submitted in advance of commencement of the course, preferably in early drafts or in drafts which are open to rethinking and regeneration. Please note that if you are submitting a novel, Belinda will ask to read from page 1.

For more details, email education@writerscentre.ie

Course Description:

Anaïs Nin wrote that “something is always born of excess”, and urged the writer to “learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness.”

Perfectionism and self-consciousness can keep early drafts from being as overflowing and as experimental (in terms of content as well as form) as they should be; but once the excess has been channeled, the shaping can begin, and the workshop can be an invaluable and energizing space in which to tackle this shaping.

In these generative sessions, you will explore the possibilities of early drafting, inviting fullness and looking towards shape; you will look at story and backstory, voice and interiority, context and subtext, and at the formal and stylistic decisions which will bring a piece of fiction to its most powerful shape.

You will read published short stories and essays which invite consideration of the notions of fullness and of moving forward from excess to coherence, from apparent chaos to the possibilities already in evidence on the page.

Belinda McKeon is the author of the novels Solace and Tender, which won and were nominated for awards including the Irish Book of the Year 2011 and the Encore Prize 2016. Her short fiction has been published in several anthologies and journals, most recently Granta and Being Various: Faber New Irish Stories. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University, where she has taught fiction since 2015. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in upstate New York and is delighted to have the opportunity to work with writers at the IWC.

Photo credit: Alen MacWeeney.

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