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Workshop in Pure Critique with Peter Bricklebank via Zoom


This class will run on 6 Thursdays from 9:30am – 12noon beginning on Thursday January 7. Class will take place via Zoom. Link will be sent via email at the time of workshop registration (please check spam filters and email admin@writerscenter with any questions or if the link isn’t received).

Open to writers of all ages and genres. Acclaimed instructor Peter Bricklebank and a table of peers provide meaningful feedback. Please join us! Tickets are $370 for this class series. Please register at

Whether writing in a garret, ivory tower, or a fever pitch of blind faith, at some point a writer needs to see other people, preferably equally deranged. For people writing fiction or nonfiction who need regular, astute feedback on ongoing projects of any length, this class provides that hothouse work environment. We’re going to put our manuscripts on the table and ask what works, what seems less effective, and why? Are there several narrative possibilities to the draft? Is the writer’s aim inchoate or focused? Are the form, structure, and pace helping or hindering the essential goal of the narrative?

What do we do in the Workshop of Pure Critique? 2-3 people volunteer the previous week.  We read their work at home anything up to about 20 pages, and then on Thursday we discuss the works intentions and how well they meet them and how they might be bettered.  Writers often can’t see the possibilities and obligations of an early draft and my workshop seeks to provide a forum where writers can try a variety new things or work on longer projects.  Everyone in class gets to present work at least twice and in the process they gain some astute, supportive feedback.  In the discussion of points large and small, writers and readers develop a better ability to critique, to see or evaluate their own manuscripts which will help them with further drafts and editing in general. This workshop for writers of stories or essays, novels or memoirs, seeks to encourage craft, a sense of form and structure, and an understanding of the writing process.  Writing is about play and taking the work seriously, so along the way we enjoy ourselves.  We never have a week where we’re not falling about laughing about something.

Instructor Peter Bricklebank has published fiction in such journals as The American Voice, Carolina Quarterly, Mid-American Review, Kansas Quarterly, Confrontation. He has published fiction, and nonfiction in The New York Times Book Review, the American Book Review, The Chicago Tribune. His chapter on writing essay and memoir appears in The Portable MFA (Writers Digest Books), and his latest nonfiction appears in the inaugural issue of Two Bridges Review. He has received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction and been a panelist for the BRIO awards for the Bronx Council of the Arts He has taught private writing workshops in NYC and in Oaxaca and Morelia (Mexico) and at New York University and elsewhere, including a year as Nonfiction writer-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University. He taught fiction and nonfiction at Bar-Ilan University in Israel in summer 2012 and taught at the Festival of Writers, Rensselaerville, New York in August 2013. As well as at HVWC, he currently teaches in the online graduate program of National University and the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence.

Event Location and Ticket Information

Date: Thursday, February 11, 2021
Times: 9:30 am - 12:00 pm

Ticket pricing:

Get tickets now
- 370

Presenter: Hudson Valley Writers Center
Presenter Phone: 9143325953