Teacher Notes: Preparing for Workshop

The day has arrived!  The day where all the days of teaching Composition finally pay off.  I am teaching a fiction workshop this summer at PCC, and I couldn't be happier about it.  I've had the opportunity to teach workshops before at PCC, but this summer feels like serendipity, a coincidence of the fates that conspired to allow me to dive into craft at a moment when I am feeling a creative resurgence.

For me, workshop is a divine space, a space of unadulterated creativity, where writers are allowed to stretch their craft, to dabble, to experiment, to try things they might not have the chance to try when writing in isolation.  In order to model this for my students, I write with them.  I try to show them that the exercises I've produced for them are not just for the "new" writer, but, like any exercise physical or mental, an opportunity to try and try again, to hone and battle, to dive headlong against a task in order to become stronger, more lithe and flexible, to remake ourselves in ways that might be surprising after multiple repetitions.

More than anything, workshop is a chance to write and write a lot.  My workshop classes are full of prompts, of freewrites, of imitations and modeling.  It is a time to read from great works, and then to try our hand at creating our own.  Today is the first day, and I feel like it is the opening of a grand adventure.

Coincidentally, today is also the day I will return to Pacific University's Low-Residency MFA for a faculty reading.  This is the space where I was taught the art of the workshop, the knack of the craft talk, and the unending passion for honing the written word.  The line up for tonight?

Pete Fromm:

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Hopefully reading from his forthcoming novel If Not for This:

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Craig Lesley:

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I'm hoping for new material, but he could read from his nonfiction Burning Fence...

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Or some of his fiction, like Storm Riders...

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The final author is a new one to me: Eduardo Corral

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While unknown to me, a quick search brings the edge of excitement even closer as his poetry promises to ignite me with inspiration.  If he dazzles, then I'll be picking up his collection Slow Lightning.

In preparation for this day full of excitement?  Double barreled coffee.