Workshop: Fiction
Lifting Up Your Reader’s Heart
Fiction Writing with Brock Clarke
Even the greatest fiction writers sometimes have trouble reaching their readers. The fiction writer Flannery O’Connor admitted as much in her essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” in which she talks about a reader "who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.’’
This is a most wanted writerly medical procedure: to be able to move someone else’s heart to the place where you can then lift it up. In this workshop, we will read each other’s stories and novel chapters with an eye toward perfecting exactly this kind of surgery. We will also do some exercises, read some published stories, and talk about how to get your work out in the world, into the hands of agents, editors, and readers.
SUBMIT
Participants are asked to please submit in advance a fiction manuscript or (a story or novel excerpt) up to 3000 words.
Please submit these materials by no later than 9:00 a.m. on April 26. Please email the manuscripts as attachments to programs@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “Clarke BLACK FLY MSS.” *Word files are preferred, but you may also send a PDF.
Brock Clarke is an award-winning author of many novels and story collections, including The Price of the Haircut, The Happiest People in the World, Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?, and the bestselling An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. His most recent book is I, Grape; Or the Case for Fiction, published by Acre Books 2021. He lives in Portland, and teaches at Bowdoin College.