Writing the Inside: A Writing Playshop

Writing the Inside: A Writing Playshop
Led by Victoria Boynton

 

In this series of three playshops, we will use flash writing to explore our mental/emotional lives—our insides. The form of flash* allows writers to treat complex content in a short piece. Participants will prepare writing, read, and offer positive comments to other writers in the playshop. What is memorable? What touches us in the writing of our peers?

 

The sessions will be devoted to exploring our insides through memory and wish, through pleasure, pain, and confusion, through danger and safety, through joy and sorrow. For each workshop, participants will bring in a flash piece based on the writing prompts for the week. Writers are invited to bring copies for the group if they like. We will read and discuss each piece. Then we will write briefly in preparation for the next week’s flash and share our beginnings.

 

This playshop welcomes emotional explorers, spiritual seekers, people in recovery from anything, and anyone curious about their inner life.

 

*A flash can be fiction, autobiography, prose-poetry, or other hybrid genres.  Mainly you will see the term Flash Fiction as you read about the genre, but it is a versatile container. For our purposes, let’s say that flash uses a maximum of 500 words. The seven-word-story is a fun exercise in extreme flash. You can find plenty of inspiration, explanation, and commentary on the internet.

 

Victoria Boynton is an English professor, emeritus, at SUNY Cortland, where she taught creative and professional writing. She has published academic articles on Margaret Atwood and Leslie Silko as well as on multicultural pedagogy. Dr. Boynton also co-edited The Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography with her friend and colleague, Jo Malin. Aside from academic publications, Boynton has published creative non-fiction in the collection, HERSPACE: WOMEN, WRITING, AND SOLITUDE; short stories in FAULTLINE and HAPPY; a chapbook of poems, CONTRAPTIONS with Stockport Flats Press; and dozens of poems in journals such as CALYX, VERSE, HARPER PALATE, AND RHINO. Her blog for her novel-in-progress, VAMPIRE GRANDMA, can be found at http://webhost1.cortland.edu/boynton/vampire-grandma/

 

Registration is required. Sign up for one, two or all three sessions. In order to ensure ample time for writing and sharing, each session is limited to 7 participants. Please contact Librarian Joyce Wheatley at jwheatley@tcpl.org for more information.