Workshops for Visual Artists, Poets & Playwrights at the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival
July 20, 2011 - Burnsville, NC -- The Carolina Mountains Literary Festival is offering three writing workshops in addition to their dozens of author readings. This year, they appeal to playwrights, poets learning about prose poetry and, most important to this area, artists wanting become better writers about their art. Each workshop is three hours long, and requires a $25 pre-registration, though participation in other festival events is free and does not require pre-registration. Participants may register through the website or by picking up a form at their local library.
Brenda Lunsford Lilly will lead Can my play be set on Mars? Creating Memorable Characters and Character Arcs
Just like a house furnished with cardboard tables and chairs, a plot filled with one dimensional characters will seem hollow and uninteresting. So, how do you create interesting characters that make your story ring true and make your play entertaining? In this workshop we will
explore exercises and techniques to enhance your creation of characters and bring them vividly to life. This workshop will help the playwright develop accurate character arcs within the story, streamline the number of characters needed to tell the story and allow the characters to naturally inform the story. The importance of dialogue will be discussed, as well, and exercises to enhance this important element of playwriting be discussed. (1:30-4:30 Friday, September 9 in the Yancey Library Meeting Room)
Lynn Ennis will lead What Words May Come: Visual Artists Writing About Art
Have you ever been completely stuck when asked to write an artist statement, a description for websites, information on exhibitions, philosophy of art/creation and/or articles for art publications? Does the thought of blogging leave you frozen? This workshop is designed to use creativity models that will help you connect your ideas and art to words. Come with issues in hand and we’ll explore various creativity models to help you in your writing. You will produce takeaways that you can continue to build on as you move forward. This will be a spirited interactive workshop that draws on a variety of techniques to get words flowing. (9 - 11:45 Saturday, September 10 in Mountain Heritage Center )
Holly Iglesias will lead What is Prose Poetry?
Just what is a prose poem? And isn’t it a contradiction in terms? We will explore the way prose poems overturn expectations of poetry simply by virtue of their appearance. Lacking the lovely curvature of lined verse, they seem like boxy, ordinary, blunt, pedestrian objects. But in fact, prose poems fulfill poetic expectations through the use of techniques common to all poetry—compression, fragmentation, figurative language, repetition, rhyme. In this workshop, participants will create prose poems that are textual equivalents of snapshots and postcards, those tiny, square-ish items that are dense packages of memory. (1:30 - 4:15 Saturday, September 10 in the Mountain Heritage Center )
For a complete schedule of events and to register online, visit cmlitfest.org.
