Creating Hyperrealities with Shane Cashman


NB: This is a six week class. It will start on Wednesday September 11th and end on Wednesday October 16th. Make-up week is Wednesday October 23rd. The second session will begin on Wednesday October 30th.

The focus of this course will be to sharpen and harness our senses through journaling, freewriting, daydreaming, people-watching, sketching, and more. All ways in which we can add many depths to our writing as we translate our ideas onto the page—no matter the genre—so that we can build narratives both unique and frightfully familiar.

This class is for anyone who wants to polish up an old draft, get a novel jumpstarted, or start something from scratch. All levels of curiosity and experience welcome.

I promise all students the space to mess up bravely, take wrong turns, experiment, revise, and learn to stop fearing the blank page—or, rather, learn to be OK with fearing the blank page.

Questions we will consider throughout reading and writing exercises:

How do we morph the spark of an idea into a multidimensional story? How do we build scenes? How do we sustain a narrative? How do we apply pressure to our characters? How do we create characters that speak like us––but even better––and or worse?

Over the course of six weeks we’ll do a good deal of reading, writing and revising. So that by the end of class we’ll be closer to a writing goal we will have set for ourselves on day one of class.

Shane Cashman’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, BBC Travel, Catapult, The Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, Fatherly, Salon, Narratively, Hippocampus Magazine, Entropy, The Observer, The Common, Chronogram, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Fiction Southeast, and elsewhere. In 2015, he won the PEN Center USA short story contest. He is also a Glimmer Train and Gigantic Magazine short fiction contest finalist. His nonfiction has been chosen as an Editor’s Pick at Longreads.com. He holds an MFA from Manhattanville College and currently teaches narrative studies in the undergraduate creative writing program at his alma mater.

 

Event Location and Ticket Information

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Hudson Valley Writers Center
300 Riverside Drive
Sleepy Hollow, NY 10591
Handicap Accessible? Yes

Date: Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - Thursday, October 31, 2019
Times: 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Ticket pricing:

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Presenter Website: https://www.writerscenter.org/calendar/cashmanfall1/