Real Writing: The Freedom of Sticking to the Facts
Thursday, May 29, 2008 (6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.)

The best stories always start like this: “This is a true story…” It’s a fact: we all love a good story. We love it even more if it’s true (or it seems true). In this seminar, we’ll talk about the telling of so-called “true” stories: how to find them, how to live them, how to research them, and finally, how to begin writing about them. We'll talk about the dangers of writing from experience and how to begin assembling a narrative out of the mess of real life. We'll look at strategies for writing, as well as dealing with the perspectives of friends, relatives and interview subjects whose memories might differ from our own. Central to this approach to creative nonfiction is the idea of attempting to create an engrossing experience for the reader, page after page and the notion that the best nonfiction writing relies upon the techniques of fiction to make the story more “real” and true to the lived experience. We all have great stories or know someone who has them. The difference between a good story and a great story is most often in the telling of it, but there’s also that murky region that even the best writers must pass through where they’re forced to confront the question: “Do I have a story here?”

In this two-hour seminar we’ll talk about how to get the story and tell it well with examples from the instructor’s life and the works of other practitioners of creative nonfiction, such as Jon Krakauer, Susan Orlean, Tim Cahill and Joan Didion.

Registration Fee: $20
To register please call (949) 498-2139 ext. 10.

Instructor
Dave Morris is the author of Storm on the Horizon: Khafji-The Battle that Changed the Course of the Gulf War (Free Press). He has covered the war in Iraq for Salon.com and the Virginia Quarterly Review since 2003. Dave has also worked in a television factory, as a rock climbing guide, a bike messenger, a photographer, a college teacher and a Marine infantry officer. His work has have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Der Spiegel, Etiqueta Negra, Rock & Ice, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. He is a regular radio and television guest on The History Channel, The Jim Lehrer Newshour and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's "Background Briefing." In December 2007, he was awarded a fellowship in creative nonfiction from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at the University of California at Irvine.

How to Promote Your Own Work
Thursday, October 26, 2006 (6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.)

This seminar is designed for writers who haven’t published, and for those who have.  It’s based on the undeniable premise that you are the strongest, most tireless advocate for your own work.  That, in the end, you are to a great extent responsible for your own career as a writer and for your work getting read.  This is sometimes a sobering fact for writers with a first book.  And certainly for those who haven’t published yet.  But the fact is, that even if you have an agent, his or her enthusiasm will wane after a while, as will your publisher’s.  If you haven’t published yet, it’s even harder.  Many opportunities are lost to writers because they recognize this fact too late, or not early enough.

This three-hour seminar will cover a wide range of things you can do to get yourself connected and to find a place for your writing.  They all require work and time, but the important fact is that they exist, these opportunities.  The seminar will begin by addressing the one thing that holds back many writers from seeking the promotion they want—themselves.  Too many writers see self-promotion—the very word smacks of PT Barnum—as undignified, as beneath the artist.  Your instructor had the same attitude for many years until he woke up and saw many of his colleagues going to conferences, networking and getting their work recognized.  Caution: this is not a miracle course.  It’s still extremely difficult to make it in the arts, and I can’t change that.  But I can offer avenues, possibilities, chances.  I can offer my own experiences of what works and what doesn’t.

To that end, I will offer three or four case histories of how one aggressive step taken on the writer’s own initiative turned into a unfolding world of opportunities.  Today, the web has created many more possibilities than before, and the seminar will explore various ways of taking advantage of that.  We’ll also discuss conferences and readings and other opportunities.  It’s an ongoing effort, building a career, and this course will provide you with a foundation upon which to start that building.

Registration Fee: $20
To register please call (949) 498-2139 ext. 17.

Instructor
Richard Goodman is the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France.  He has written on a variety of subjects for many national publications, including The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Commonweal, Vanity Fair, Garden Design, Grand Tour, The Writer’s Chronicle, salon.com, Saveur, Ascent and The Michigan Quarterly Review.  He has twice been awarded a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony and twice been awarded a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  He is a winner of a Hopwood Award for his fiction.  He wrote the introduction for Travelers’ Tales Provence.  His essay, “In Search of the Exact Word,” is the lead essay in the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.  He is the Fine Presses Editor for Fine Books & Collections.