Creative Writing Workshop
In Fiction And Memoir

Please click the Schedules link for 2008 workshop information

The Workshops

Designed for both new and more experienced writers, this 10-week session offers professional instruction in craft, and the supportive atmosphere of a workshop setting. Class meetings consist of group discussion of participants’ manuscripts -- which also receive written comments from the instructor -- as well as analyses of stories and essays by writers as varied as Lorrie Moore, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and David Sedaris. We will discuss the elements at the heart of all good storytelling: character, dialogue, scene, style, and conflict. In addition, part of each session will be devoted to in-class writing exercises in which key memories, vintage photographs, and newspaper headlines are the starting points for intriguing characters and plots. In this workshop we will trust our powers of intuition, while developing the technique which allows us to writer a daring, disciplined prose. Toward the end of the course, the topic of publication will be discussed. The Workshops are limited to ten participants.

The Instructor

Since 1992, Julia Thacker has facilitated both beginning and intensive creative writing workshops. Students from previous workshops have published widely - in Granta, Harper’s, The Massachusetts Review and The North American Review to name a few.

Julia Thacker’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Agni, The Boston Globe Magazine, New Directions, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and others. She has been the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe, two fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She has taught creative writing at Brown University, Harvard University Summer School, Tufts University and in the Radcliffe Seminars.