Join Connie Willis and Amal El-Mohtar for a two-day intensive writing workshop held in Seattle this June. Early registration is open! Further details, including session topics, will emerge later down the line.
The workshops will bookend the Locus Awards weekend.
Friday, June 28, 2019, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Sunday, June 30, 2019, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
$265
SESSION ONE: AMAL EL-MOHTAR: USING POETRY TO WRITE PROSE
Poetry and prose are often understood as opposites, to the point where poetry turning up in novels is seen as intrusive, while narrative poetry is often dismissed as incapable of seriousness. In this workshop we’ll approach poetry and prose as related modes with different emphases, play with sensory affect, and explore how drawing on poetry can help unlock or overcome problems in our prose fiction.
SESSION TWO: CONNIE WILLIS: LAYING THE TRAPS: USING FORESHADOWING, MISDIRECTION, AND PLOT EXPLICATION TO CATCH AND KEEP YOUR READER
As Opus of Bloom County once said, “Foreshadowing: your key to quality literature,” and he was so right. People are used to thinking of foreshadowing as those awful “Had I but known when I crossed the moat to the dark castle…” things, but it’s so much more. And it can make the difference between a blah ending and a dazzling one. Connie Willis will teach the art of using setup, foreshadowing, clue-hiding, question-raising, misdirection, prophecies, and plot exposition to enhance your writing and intensify your payoffs.
Connie Willis is the critically acclaimed author of Doomsday Book, Passage, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Bellwether. Willis has been awarded eleven Hugo Awards, eleven Locus Awards and six Nebula Awards. Her stories have an epic feel to them and range from laugh out loud funny to deadly serious. Her keen observations illuminate the humor, love, and redemption found in both the comic and the tragic. Celebrated as a humorist with spot-on comic timing, she also uses her fiction to examine larger questions: the nature of God, the persistence of suffering and loss, and the role of love and redemption. Willis most recently won a Hugo Award for her books Blackout and All Clear (August 2011). She was inducted to the Science Fiction Museum and Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 and received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 2011.
Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism. She edited Goblin Fruit magazine for several years, and her work has appeared in NPR Books, The New York Times, Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium; as well as anthologized in The Djinn Falls in Love, The Starlit Wood, Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. She has received the Richard Jefferies Poetry Prize, as well as Rhysling Awards, a Nebula Award, a Hugo Award, and two Locus Awards. Her collection The Honey Month came out in 2010. She became the “Otherworldly” columnist at The New York Times Book Review in 2018 and her novella, This Is How You Lose the Time War, co-written with Max Gladstone, is available July 2019. She lives in Ottawa, Canada, where she drinks tea, lifts weights, plays harp, and writes letters to her friends by hand.
Locus Writers Workshops
Locus Magazine has been co-running a writing workshop in Seattle around the Locus Awards Weekend for the past few years and also runs classes in the Bay Area. Past instructors include Charlie Jane Anders, Gail Carriger, Christopher Barzak, Yoon Ha Lee, Carrie Vaughn, Daryl Gregory, Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Park, and Connie Willis.
Thinking of attending? Please do. We support diversity! We encourage people of color, women, people with disabilities, older people, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people to apply. We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, age, size, nationality, religion, culture, education level, and self-identification.
