Revising Your Prose in a Changed World:
Revision Class (Virtual)
Date: 4 Thursdays, May 21 - June 11
Time: 7 - 9 pm
Instructor: Mary Volmer
Ages: Adult
Genre: Fiction/Nonfiction
Price: $245
This is a course on revising fiction and creative nonfiction, but it is also, and must be, a course that considers how this moment of crisis has changed our relationship to our work, and how writers in the past grew to understand their vocations in relation to crisis.
In four weeks, you will learn techniques of layering. You will learn to recognize and amplify resonance. You will learn to how sharpen characterization, how to tighten dramatic structure, how to shape scenes, and how to prune prose down to essential "telling details."
In addition to these practical, craft-centered lessons, we will read and discuss short pieces by writers, such as Albert Camus, Ursula Le Guin, and James Baldwin, who lived and worked in turbulent times.Together, using our new skills and their wisdom, we will forge the courage we need to revise, and to go on living and creating.
Suitable for long and short form prose writers, this craft class will utilize short lectures, guided revision exercises, and shared inquiry, and will be conducted on the user-friendly platform Zoom.
The only prerequisite is that you have a draft of a manuscript to revise, however raw it might be.
Mary Volmer is the author of two novels: Crown of Dust and Reliance, Illinois. Her essays, reviews, and short stories have appeared in various publications, including Mutha Magazine, The Farallon Review, Women’s Basketball Magazine, Fiction Writers Review, Historical Novel Society Review, The New Orleans Review, Brevity, and Ploughshares (online).
Mary has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook and was the spring 2015 Distinguished Visiting Writer in Residence at Saint Mary’s College, where she now teaches.
More about Mary: www.maryvolmer.com