07
Workshop #
07
Don’t share it yet! Giving and Receiving the Best Feedback for your Short Story.
By
Rebekah Jane Clarkson
By virtue of their brevity, it is quick and easy to provide a writer with great feedback on a short story, right?
Wrong! (And we’ve all lived through a horror to know it.) But at some point in the writing process, we need and want to receive feedback on our short stories. The first half of this workshop will guide you through a range of reflections to help you better understand your own creative process as a short story writer, how to find appropriate feedback and how to hear it in a way that empowers you to serve the story you’ve written. When should we seek feedback? How? And from whom? Is a writing group a good idea? And what group model – if any – might suit us best? The second half of the workshop will provide strategies for giving astute and sensitive feedback on the stories of others and particularly, how to shed light on missed narrative opportunities peculiar to the short form – those elusive and wondrous ‘gaps’ that have the capacity to create whole worlds. This workshop is designed to be empowering, illuminating and skill-building: no scary feedback sessions here.
Biography
Rebekah Clarkson is the author of Barking Dogs (Affirm Press), a short story cycle set in Mount Barker, in the Adelaide hills of South Australia where the author lives. Her stories have been recognised in major awards in Australia and overseas, including the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, Fish Publishing Short Story Prize and Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open. Her short stories have appeared in publications including Griffith Review, Best Australian Stories and Something Special, Something Rare: Outstanding Short Stories by Australian Women (Black Inc.). She has a BA in Aboriginal Studies and an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide and works as a learning adviser at the University of South Australia. She has taught fiction writing at a number of Australian Universities and at the University of Texas at Austin. Rebekah is a Board Member of the Society for the Study of the Short Story.