10
Workshop #
10
The Essence and the Practice: a Theory and a Coached Story
By
Robert Olen Butler
(Please note final paragraph for necessary class preparation.) The workshop will have two parts. One will focus on the fundamentals of the creative process for any fiction writers, beginning or advanced, who aspire to create enduring literature. We will address such issues as what is art and what is distinctive about the way the artist addresses the world, the inner self, and the objects to be created. The second part will be a carefully constructed, orally coached, in-class writing session that will help attendees instantly exercise the parts of their artistic self identified in the first part and that could potentially yield a viable short story. Absolutely essential: Bring to the workshop an appropriate mode of story-writing that you are comfortable using, anything ranging from portable computer to paper and pencil.
Biography
Robert Olen Butler has published eighteen novels and six volumes of short stories, one of which, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has appeared four times in The Best American Short Stories and eight times in New Stories from the South. He was also the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. His works have been translated into twenty-one languages. Butler teaches creative writing at Florida State University and lives in Capps, Florida, population two, with his wife, Clara Guzman Herrera.