A series of works and lecture in collaboration with Duke Arts Create, the Duke Writers Collective, and the Department of English. It offers once-a-month workshops that bring writers from around the Triangle to Duke for 90-minute lectures on the craft.
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
“Getting Started”
JP Gritton & Mesha Maren
314 Allen
3:30-5:00 PM
Professors Maren and Gritton will discuss the agony and ecstasy of writing the first words of a story, chapter, or poem using a quartet of brief readings as a starting point.
Professor JP Gritton:
JP Gritton’s novel Wyoming, a Kirkus best debut of 2019, is out with Tin House. His awards include a Cynthia Woods Mitchell fellowship, the Meringoff Prize in fiction, and the Donald Barthelme Prize in fiction. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. His essays have appeared in Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of creative writing in the English department at Duke University.
www.jpgritton.com | Social Media - Instagram: @jpgritton
Professor Mesha Maren:
Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run, Perpetual West, and Shae (May 2024, Algonquin Books). Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Sou’wester, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She received the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She was the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University.
https://meshamaren.com | Social Media - Facebook: @meshamaren, Instagram - @meshamaren Twitter - @meshamaren
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
"Felony & Fiction”
Cynthia Weiner
Ruby Lounge
6:00 PM
Weiner will explain how she crafted her novel around the infamous "Preppy Murder" of 1986. She'll discuss fictionalizing true crimes and guide a writing intensive where participants create their own stories.
Felony & Fiction: A presentation and workshop led by Cynthia Weiner, Assistant Director of The Writers Studio, NYC, and author of the novel A Gorgeous Excitement (Crown, 2025). Weiner will explain how she crafted her novel around the infamous "Preppy Murder" of 1986. She'll discuss fictionalizing true crimes and guide a writing intensive where participants create their own stories incorporating true crime case elements. Choose from a selection of cases in the handout (or bring your own) and begin to craft your original, fictional piece.
Cynthia Weiner has had a long career writing and teaching fiction. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, and Epiphany, and her story “Boyfriends” was awarded a Pushcart Prize. She is also the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City. A Gorgeous Excitement, her first novel, was inspired by her upbringing on New York’s Upper East Side in the 1980s, and particularly by the infamous “Preppy Murder” of 1986. Weiner now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
www.Cynthiaweiner.com | Social Media - Facebook: @cynthia.weiner.31, Instagram@cynthiaweiner
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
"The Kitchen”
M. Randal O’Wain
314 Allen
3:30-5:00 PM
THE KITCHEN--an exercise in show or tell: In this afternoon course, we will consider the kitchen from two stylistic vantage points. The first will be a sensory approach where we will consider all the physical details that create a fully inhabited scene. We will focus on how to imbue descriptions with a psychological center. The second, will be a cerebral/expository approach where the mind is in charge of considering the kitchen from the unique, peculiar ways we observe the world intellectually. We will focus on how observation and reflection--the act of turning over, whittling down, deconstructing--performs an individual's process of discovery for the reader.
M. Randal O’Wain is an essayist and fiction writer from Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of Meander Belt: family, loss, and coming of age in the working-class south (Nebraska, 2019) and the story collection Hallelujah Station (Autumn House, 2020). His essays and stories have appeared in Masters Review, Zone 3, Hotel Amerika, Guernica, and Oxford American. He holds an MFA from Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and teaches at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Social Media - Instagram: @ranowain
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
"Revision”
Robert Wallace
314 Allen
3:30-5:00 PM
What is revision in fiction writing if not a serious of tasks? Imagination, of course, is essential, but it will only get you so far on the page. For the reader, who wants a finished piece and not a sketch or first draft, it is about a world that a creative writer has assembled in such a way that all the elements, put together in such a way that it brings a story to life.
Just as painters must refine their palette, or athletes must work tirelessly on perfecting their craft, writers, too, need to constantly hone their skills in writing fiction. Character, point of view, scene, voice, dialogue—in other words, everything, right down to word choice, is up for remodeling. This workshop will discuss what revision is, ways to approach revising your fiction, examples of revised fiction, and how to know, if that’s possible, when a story has been truly revised. Opportunity will be given for participants to engage in revising work during class.
Robert Wallace has received a Writers’ Fellowship from the NC Arts Council. He has published over fifty short stories in various journals, including the Bryant Literary Review, the NC Literary Review, and the International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. He is a two-time winner of the Doris Betts’ Fiction Prize. Wallace’s novel, A Hold on Time, was published in 2007 by Paper Journey Press. His short story collection As Breaks the Wave Upon the Sea was published by the Main Street Rag Publishing Company in 2021. He has done presentations at the International Conference on Sport Literature, The NC Writers’ Conference, and at The International Federation on Aging Conference. He has been critiquing manuscripts for the North Carolina Writers’ Network for the past twenty-five years.
Website: https://www.robertwallaceauthor.com/ | Social Media - Instagram: @robertwallacewriter