How Fiction Works
Workshop with Claire Keegan, November 19 & 20, Townhall, Cavan
9.30am to 5.30pm daily
Claire Keegan, internationally acclaimed author and teacher of creative writing, will run a 2 day fiction workshop in Cavan. This weekend will concentrate on works-in-progress submitted by the participants. Manuscripts (novel excerpt or short story of up to 3,000 words) are due on Tuesday 8 November, distributed to every participant, and read with care by all. Keegan will spend between 3-5 hours on each text before the workshop begins, and will then examine and discuss every text with the group during the weekend. Discussion will include the structure of a narrative, paragraph structure, time, tension, drama, melodrama, statement, description, suggestion, conflict, character, humour, point of view, place, time and setting. The aim, always, is to help each author with the next draft. The weekend will be of particular interest to those who write, teach, read or edit fiction -- but anyone with an interest in how fiction works, improving their prose and/or helping others to do so, is welcome to attend.
While most participants like to submit a manuscript, this is not a requirement. The course tuition fee is €200, this rate is subsidised by Cavan County Council. There are limited places on this workshop and preference will be to people living in County Cavan.
To book your place, please contact ckfictionclinic@yahoo.com
Claire Keegan Biog.
Claire Keegan has written Antarctica, Walk the Blue Fields and Foster (Faber & Faber). These stories, now translated into 14 languages, have won numerous awards. Walk the Blue Fields was Richard Ford’s Book of the Year in The Guardian, 2010. Foster won the Davy Byrne’s Award, then the world’s richest prize for a single story. Of Antarctica, The Observer said, “these stories are among the finest stories recently written in English.” Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize, awarded to the strongest collection published in the British Isles. Foster was elected by readers as the best story published that year in The New Yorker. She also has earned an international reputation as a teacher of fiction, having taught workshops on four continents. She holds an MA and an M.Phil in Creative Writing.
“Every line seems to be a lesson in the perfect deployment of both style and emotion. –Hilary Mantel
“The best stories are so textured and so moving, so universal but utterly distinctive, that it’s easy to imagine readers savouring them many years from now and to imagine critics, far in the future, deploying new lofty terms to explain what it is that makes Keegan’s fiction work.” -The New York Times
“Every single word in the right place and pregnant with double meaning.” - Jeffrey Eugenides, The New York Times
Keegan is a rarity, someone I will always want to read.” – Richard Ford