The Storyteller and the Story: Prose Workshop
Dates: 6 Tuesdays, 9/27-11/1
Time: 7-9 pm
Instructor: Laleh Khadivi
Ages: Adult
Genre: Prose (Fiction and Nonfiction)
Price: $395
Can you tell a good story? Can you enchant an audience without a text? Or do you prefer to work out your worlds on the page, at your own speed, the audience in your mind. In this workshop we will examine the differences between storytelling and story writing and try to harness the enchantment of one to fuel the other. We will study storytellers to see exactly how they use tension, atmosphere, pacing, silence, and sound to captivate the listener. Every class will have an element of listening as I will bring in recordings of modern storytellers from Ira Glass to Glynn Washington and others. Your own work will also be transposed from the written to the spoken and back again in hopes of identifying hidden strengths and weaknesses. Class will consist of weekly readings and in-class storytelling. This workshop provides an excellent exercise for anyone starting or in the middle of a work of fiction or non-fiction interested in tapping into the essential core of their story.
Laleh Khadivi is a novelist and short story writer. Her projects include The Kurdish Trilogy, a series of books that follows the fate of three generations of Kurdish-Iranian men as they leave the land of their tribe and take on new identities in the rest of the world. The first book in the series, The Age of Orphans, received the Whiting Award for Fiction, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and was long listed for the Dublin IMPAC award. The third book of the trilogy, A Good Country, is forthcoming in 2017.
Her fiction and non-fiction can be found in The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. She is the recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a 2016 Pushcart Prize.
More about Laleh: http://laleh-khadivi.com