This free five-week intensive workshop is designed for fiction writers seeking thoughtful feedback, rigorous discussion, and a supportive community of peers. Each three-hour session will include discussion of two participant manuscripts as well as a craft-focused conversation. Participants engage in constructive and collaborative dialogue with one another's work.
Jared Sayet (C'10) is a longtime member of the KWH community whose recent stories have received two Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in North American Review, Booth, and Chiron Review. Jared led the Kelly Writers House Spring Fiction Workshop earlier this year. As an instructor, he has mentored and edited the work of dozens of writers in the early stages of their careers, combining craft-based education with guided creative discussion.
Sir David Attenborough once asked: “What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?” Birds are universal and ubiquitous. They populate our experiences of the world and flit through our dreams and imaginings. There’s something of wonder about birds, something observable, evasive, evocative. They fascinate us; they always have. We watch them, listen for them, sketch their outlines; we make notes in journals about the ones we’ve seen and the ones we live in hope to see. In this book group, we’ll become literary birders and read a variety of poems in which birds perch or dart or glide across our minds eye to grab our attention and take it with them up into the high branches of a tree or the wide expanse of sky.
Kevin Varrone is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Box Score: An Autobiography, as well as numerous chapbooks. His poems have appeared in various literary magazines and journals, including the Academy of American Poets poem-a-day anthology. He has been a fellow at The Poets House in Northern Ireland and an artist resident at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Nova Scotia. In 2012 he was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for poetry. He has taught literature, creative writing, and first-year writing courses in Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia and has taught at Temple since 2004.