The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation, through a grant from the Pocahontas County Convention and Visitors Bureau Calvin W. Price Appalachian Enrichment Series, presents the 2017 PSBBF Creative Writing Workshops.
‘We Must Get Back to the Land’
Engaging Sense of Place in Your Writing
Thursday, June 22, 1 to 4:30 p.m.
Fiction workshop, “Mining the Landscape,” with Maria Manilla.
Often the setting for our prose and poetry is a remembered landscape that no longer exits. Forests thin and reclaim, rivers shrink and swell, roads and power lines bisect, towns are built and die – and are reborn if we’re lucky. People and animals return to dust. Our writing then becomes a nostalgic resurrection. In this workshop we’ll mine the landscape from the past and pair it with the reality of what that place is now, whether urban or rural, industrial or pastoral, populated or visited only by ghosts.
Beginning, intermediate and advanced writers are welcome and encouraged to attend this open-to-the public workshop.
Workshop fee is $10 per person.
Advanced registrations are accepted but not required.
Attendees should bring writing materials.
Light refreshments will be served.
West Virginia native Marie Manilla is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her novel, The Patron Saint of Ugly (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) won the Weatherford Award sponsored by the Appalachian Studies Association and Berea College. Shrapnel (RCP, 2012), received The Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel. Stories in her collection, Still Life With Plums (WVU Press, 2010) first appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review, Calyx, and other journals.
Manilla is a visiting faculty member in West Virginia Wesleyan’s Low-Residency MFA Program. She lives in Huntington, her hometown. Learn more at www.mariemanilla.com
To pre-register, please call the PSBBF at 304-653-4430 or email at info@pearlsbuckbirthplace.com
