FIVE-DAY JURIED WORKSHOPS
June 22 | 4 to 5 pm
June 23-27 | 8:30 am to 12 noon
June 26 | student/faculty dinner
Juried admission | Writing sample required
Limited to 12 students per workshop

Jan Greenberg :: Writing for Young Readers :: SOLD OUT

Jan Greenberg is the author of seven novels and 13 books of nonfiction for young readers, including Action Jackson, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Heart to Heart, a Printz Honor Book; and Vincent Van Gogh, a Sibert Honor Book. Her most recent books are Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Through the Gates and Beyond and an anthology, Side by Side: New Poems Inspired by Art from Around the World. She has taught at Webster University and has appeared as a guest lecturer at writing conferences, universities, and book festivals throughout the country. She lives with her husband and two standard poodles in St. Louis, Missouri.

Course Description: This workshop is a mixture of shared readings, exercises, and lectures that focus on children's literature, including novels for middle-graders and young adults, biographies, and picture books. As good writing is good writing, regardless of the intended audience, we will explore character development, plot, voice, setting and dialogue. We will also discuss submission and marketing techniques.

Richard Bausch :: Fiction :: SOLD OUT

Richard Bausch is the author of 11 novels, including Thanksgiving Night, Hello to the Cannibals and the forthcoming Peace , and seven volumes of short stories, among them Someone to Watch Over Me and Spirits, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, Esquire, Playboy, GQ, Harper's, and other publications, and has been featured in prize-winning anthologies, including the O. Henry Awards' Best American Short Stories. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee, where he holds the Lillian and Morrie A. Moss Chair of Excellence at the University of Memphis.

Course Description: This workshop is an intensive exploration of the elements of writing fiction, the uses of the imagination, and the demands of literary genres, including the short story and the novel. The workshop will focus on techniques for character development, plot, conflict, dialogue, beginnings, endings, the writing process and basic storytelling.

©Lisa Cupolo

William Loizeaux :: Narrative Nonfiction :: SOLD OUT

William Loizeaux teaches at Johns Hopkins University, where he has received awards for teaching excellence and professional achievement. He is the author of two memoirs: The Shooting of Rabbit Wells and Anna: A Daughter’s Life, which was a 1993 New York Times Notable Book. His stories and essays have appeared in journals such as TriQuarterly, American Scholar, and the Christian Science Monitor. His recent children’s novel, Wings, received the ASPCA Henry Bergh Children’s Award and was the Golden Kite Award Honor Book for Fiction. Another children’s novel, Clarence Cochran: A Human Boy, is forthcoming in 2009. He lives with his wife and daughter in Hyattsville, Maryland.

Course Description: This workshop — designed for essayists, journalists, and writers of memoir and/or creative nonfiction — will explore the art of telling true stories. We will do some outside reading, but mainly focus on your work, with attention to creating interest, developing a narrative arc and scenes, exploiting research opportunities, and crafting a distinctive voice.

(c) BTyroler

Sue Miller :: Advanced Fiction :: SOLD OUT

Sue Miller has written a collection of short stories, a memoir, and eight novels, including While I Was Gone, The Good Mother and The Senator’s Wife. Her numerous honors include a Guggenheim, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and the Carl Sandburg Prize from the Chicago Public Library. Her work has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and The Orange Prize. She is a committed advocate for the writer’s engagement with society at large through her alliance with PEN. She has taught fiction at many universities, including Amherst, Bennington, Tufts, and MIT. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Course Description: Being your own best editor is at the heart of what it means to be a good writer, and this advanced fiction class will work on editing. Using the best work you can bring in, we will talk about intention, about what serves it best and how to bring that to the fore; about what doesn't, and why, and how to change that. The workshop will be rigorous but collegial, and it will aim at making you the best reader possible of your own work.

(c) Elena Seibert

Pamela Painter :: Fiction :: SOLD OUT

Pamela Painter is the author of two story collections: The Long and Short of It and Getting to Know the Weather, winner of the GLCA Award for First Fiction. She is also co-author of the widely used textbook, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Quick Fiction, and in numerous anthologies, such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, and MicroFiction. She has received fellowships from the Massachussetts Artists Foundation and the NEA; has won three Pushcart Prizes; and earned Agni Review’s John Cheever Award for Fiction. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where she teaches in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Program at Emerson College.

Course Description: Come to the first class with a story that is capable of being stretched and challenged by various writing assignments you will be asked to do “inside” the story. These assignments will explore various techniques in the art and craft of fiction — the interior landscape of your characters, the double ending, the end foretold, summarized dialogue, narrative summary, structure — and reading as a writer.

(c) Eric Rasmussen

Robert Pinsky :: Poetry :: SOLD OUT

Robert Pinsky is the former U.S. Poet Laureate, a post he held for an unprecedented three terms; the bestselling author of seven volumes of poetry; and an award-winning scholar, translator, and editor of poetry. His poems have earned praise for their wild musical energy and ambitious range. His books of poetry include Gulf Music, First Things to Hand, and The Figured Wheel, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His books about poetry include Poetry and the World, which was nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and his translations include The Inferno of Dante, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.

Course Description: Direct from the author: “Informal, candid, stringent, light-hearted discussion of poems by participants. In-class exercises if indicated by popular demand. Participants encouraged to type up and bring to first meeting an anthology: twelve poems — at least six written before 1960 —that exemplify magnificent models.”

(c) Emma Dodge Hanson

Cerena Thomsen :: Young Writers Workshop

For the past eight years, Cerena Thomsen has been teaching at Aspen High School, where she earned the Teacher of Merit Award. Along with the standard literature courses for grades 10-12, her teaching credits include Creative Writing and Journalism. Currently, she advises the school literary magazine, NespaMerge. Her love for writing stems from her experience with the New Jersey Writing Project, where she first began using a workshop approach to learning and teaching writing. She has a passion for working with teenagers and helping them discover their voices. She resides in Aspen with her husband and two children.

Course Description: The Young Writers Workshop is for teenagers (ages 14-18) who are ready for an adventure in storytelling while making new friends. In this workshop, writers will play with free-writing to jumpstart creativity, brainstorm with other writers to find out how to make their stories better and discover what it takes to become a great writer.

Nic Pizzolatto :: Beginning Fiction :: SOLD OUT

Nic Pizzolatto was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Oxford American, Iowa Review, Missouri Rzzeview, and various other literary journals. He has received several awards, and his work has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction. His first book, Between Here and the Yellow Sea, was named by Poets & Writers as one of the top five fiction debuts of 2006. He currently lives in Chicago, where he teaches writing and literature at the University of Chicago.

Course Description: This class will undertake a close study of the rhetorical strategies, methods, and artistic processes involved in fiction writing, through the creation and analysis of student work within the workshop format. Students will learn to identify various technical aspects of literary craft and utilize them in their own creative endeavors.

(c) Dorothy Smith

Douglas Bauer :: Food Writing & Magazine Writing

Douglas Bauer’s books include the novels, Dexterity, The Very Air, and The Book of Famous Iowans, and the nonfiction books, Prairie City, Iowa and The Stuff of Fiction. His stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, Tin House, and many other publications. He has received grants from the NEA and the Massachusetts Arts Council. He previously worked as an editor at Playboy and for several years as a freelance magazine writer. As a teacher, he has been given two Excellence in Teaching awards from the Harvard-Danforth Center and is currently a professor of literature at Bennington College in Vermont.

Course Description:
June 22 | 4 to 5 pm
Food Writing | June 23 & 24
Magazine Writing | June 25 & 26
Limited to 12 students per workshop

Food writing:
The course will ask and answer these questions: How does writing about food become something more than offering ingredients and saying how things taste? What raises it from words about recipes to lovely, high craft? In sum we'll be working with the premise in mind that writing about food is writing about the tastes of life's daily episodes.

Magazine writing:
Writing for magazines poses rich questions: What is the editorial personality of the magazine? What are its readers’ interests? And, getting down to basics, How do I write as well as I can given limited space and strict deadlines? Overall, we'll concentrate not on the marketing of the idea but on its artfulness -- the structural variety of articles and the quality of the prose.

(c) Sue Miller

Shashi Tharoor :: Reader’s Retreat :: June 25 & 26
Shashi Tharoor is the prize-winning author of ten books, both fiction and non-fiction, and a widely-published critic and columnist (The Hindu, The Times of India and Newsweek). His books include the classic The Great Indian Novel; India: From Midnight to the Millennium; Nehru; and The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone. Last year he concluded a nearly 29-year career with the United Nations, culminating as the Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information. He is currently chairman of Dubai-based Afras Ventures. He was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos as a "Global Leader of Tomorrow” and he holds the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman award, India’s highest honor for overseas Indians.

Course description:
Limited to 40 students
We invite you to join us for our Readers’ Retreat — the ultimate in armchair travels. Discover India through its contemporary writing in this two-day literature appreciation class. Dr. Shashi Tharoor (see bio, page 3) will moderate this fun, lively, informative and informal discussion of the works of the Indian authors in attendance at Aspen Summer Words. You will have the unique opportunity to study the works of these authors with one of the nation’s top scholars and then see them on stage during the Festival*.

* Separate tickets are required for entrance to Festival events.