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05

Workshop #

05

Short Fiction Critique Roundtable

By

Billie Travalini

How do you get readers to care enough about your characters to keep them reading? How can you reveal settings without slowing the plot? The answer is conflict, the magical ingredient that allows the other ingredients to “strut their stuff.” At the workshop, we will have a brief discussion about the central role of conflict in today’s Twitter-paced world. After this, we will comment on one another's in-progress short fiction.  For participation in the workshop, please email me a one to five-page story, or excerpt, as self-contained as possible, by April 30, 2022 to btravalini@gmail.com. Notification of acceptance will be emailed by May 10, 2022.  Participants will be asked to prepare for the workshop by writing brief comments beforehand on questions that I will email prior to the workshop. I will share one other submission, (another participant’s short story), with each participant for similar comments. You will receive my questions and the submission by May 30, 2022. At the end of the workshop, you will have a better idea about how conflict energizes your scenes and drives your plot forward.

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Biography

Billie Travalini’s work has been published in The Moth, Another Chicago Magazine, Things Left and Found by the Side of the Road, and Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, among others. Her memoir, Blood Sisters, was a finalist for the Bakeless Publication Prize and won the Lewes Clark Discovery Prize. Her edited work includes On the Mason Dixon Line: an Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers, No Place Like Here: An Anthology of Southern Delaware Poetry and Prose, and Teaching Trouble Youth: A Practical Pedagogical Guide. She is a recipient of the Governor’s Award for the Arts, Education, the Delaware Division of the Arts, Masters Award in Literature, and the National Federation of Press Women Communicator of Achievement Award, the organization’s highest award. A longtime advocate for at-risk kids and the mentally ill, she is co-founder and coordinator of the Lewes Creative Writers Conference, teaches creative writing at Wilmington University and is busy at work on Rush Limbaugh and the French Apple Pie and Other Stories and Rules to Survive Childhood, a sequel to Blood Sisters.

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