BRATTLEBORO — The Brattleboro Literary Festival and Marlboro College present three writing workshops to kick off the 2014 festival.
The workshops, covering fiction and nonfiction, are Friday, Oct. 3, from 1 to 4:45 p.m. at Marlboro College Graduate Center, 28 Vernon St.
Leaders are authors Leslie Jamison, Julia Fierro, and Pamela Painter.
The fee for each session is $75. Space in each class is limited to 12. Participants “will submit relevant, original works for discussion and revision,” the event announcement explains.
• Fierro is the founder of Brooklyn's Sackett Street Writers' Workshop, a creative home to more than 2,500 writers since 2002. Her novel, Cutting Teeth, was included in Library Journal's “Spring 2014 Best Debuts” and is on the most-anticipated-books lists of HuffPost Books, The Millions, Flavorwire, Brooklyn Magazine, and Marie Claire.
She leads “Get Closer to Your Characters: A Point-of-View Fiction Workshop” in which participants will examine how to create characters “so complex, so nuanced, that they are impossible to be dismissed - characters worthy of the reader's sympathy and investment.”
• Jamison is the author of a New York Times bestselling collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, and the novel The Gin Closet, which is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award.
At Marlboro, she'll lead a workshop on flash memoir. Participants will discuss the possibilities of compression: “how to capture our infinite lives in finite frames. There's an exhilaration to concision, and students will submit original memoirs of 600 words or less for this workshop,” reads the event listing.
• Painter is the author of three story collections: Getting to Know the Weather, The Long and Short of It, and the flash collection Wouldn't You Like to Know. She also is co-author of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers.
At Marlboro she'll lead “How Flash Works,” which will explore the speed, detail, and tight narrative arc typical of this dynamic style. Participants will workshop submitted stories of 100-250 words and take plenty of time to begin new stories.